Acquisition progress of Broadcom - Qualcomm - NXP, and more such news early 2018

Date: 24/01/2018
The most significant acquisition news in semiconductor industry in 2017 is Broadcom acquiring Qualcomm. The process had just started in 2017 with much to happen in 2018.

Even Qualcomm has still not yet completed the acquisition of NXP. However it has announced that the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) authorized the acquisition of NXP Semiconductors by Qualcomm. With this it has now received 8 of the 9 approvals around the world, with China remaining.

Qualcomm said it is committed to exclude certain near-field communication (NFC) patents from the proposed transaction and ensure that NXP licenses those patents to third parties. Qualcomm also added that it is committed not to assert the NFC patents it will acquire from NXP and maintain interoperability between Qualcomm’s baseband chipsets and NXP’s NFC chips and rivals baseband chipsets and NFC chips. Qualcomm to continue to offer a license to MIFARE on terms commensurate with those offered by NXP today.

Broadcom stated in a release that "Qualcomm has refused to engage with Broadcom and has instead elected to remain a standalone company, which fails to address Qualcomm's fundamental business challenges, including its ongoing disputes with customers and regulatory investigations in numerous jurisdictions."

"Qualcomm management has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered since the announcement of its "strategic realignment plan" in 2015, resulting in an inability to meet financial targets as well as deteriorating profitability and destruction of stockholder value." is another statement by Broadcom.

To give some more acquisition news at the begin of 2018:

1. Electronics component distributor Arrow has acquired India based electronics product realisation design services company eInfochips. With the engineering staff strength of around 1500, eInfochips is into chip design, and electronics product design services.

2. Synopsys has acquired OTP NVM IP expert Kilopass to strengthen its OTP NVM offerings. Kilopass antifuse based one transistor and two two transistor bitcell NVM is used in semiconductor chips down to 7nm for creating device id, secure key storage, and such non -volatile storage.

3. Silicon Labs to acquire Sigma Designs for approximately $282 million. Sigma Designs is known for its Z-Wave technology used in Internet of Things (IoT) technology for smart home solutions.

Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
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