There's a ridiculous amount of consolidation going on the semiconductor industry these days.
Freescale (formerly Motorola) was purchased by NXP (formerly Phillips) in 2015. Qualcomm is in the process of buying NXP, although apparently there's been some difficulty getting it past the European regulators. Now it sounds like Qualcomm is going to get swallowed up by Broadcom. That's going to be a huge company.
Last year, Microchip bought Atmel, ADI bought Linear Tech, ON Semiconductor bought Fairchild, and Renesas bought Intersil. The year before, Intel bought Altera.
Any bets on the last two semiconductor conglomerates standing? I'm thinking Intel vs. Samsung. I hope whoever swallows up ON Semiconductor rebrands to the Fairchild name - there's almost something poetic about a reverse-Fairchildren split.
EDIT: I should also point out that "Broadcom" isn't really Broadcom anymore - Avago Technologies purchased Broadcom last year and took on the Broadcom name for itself. Avago was previously the semiconductor division of Agilent which in turn was a spinoff of Hewlett-Packard. Avago traces its lineage back to the semiconductor division of HP which was formed way back in 1961.
I've heard that mergers aren't (legally) supposed to be anticompetitive, but I've seen the banking and semiconductor industries undergo a merger-fueled competition implosion in the last few decades, so obviously whatever mechanisms we have in place are laughably insufficient. As a voter, what keywords should I pick up on to fight the good fight?
Chinese are just glad to have one big fish to swallow, instead of 20 small.
Qualcomm and Broadcomm both spent enormous funds trying to enter Chinese market. Both ended up with Pyrrhic victories
Qualcomm sold distribution deal for China to Allwinner guys where they chew into their already small margins - most Chinese smartphone makers simply do not pay "Qualcomm tax"
Broadcomm bought few Chinese wifi fablesses, yanked up prices. Most Chinese soc fablesses just switched to own internal IP
Infineon tried to buy Wolfspeed (Cree’s RF spin-off). Triquint merged with RFMD to form Quorvo. Who the hell comes up with these names? At least Triquint was a cool name.
Analog device bought Hittite and destroyed a good web site.
Avago isn’t even that clear cut. Avago sold SSD assets to Seagate, and then a bunch of other networking stuff as LSI/Axxia/Infineon to Intel. Then they picked up PLX and Emulex along the way.
Broadcom had also acquired Netlogic/RMI before that, so it is consolidation all the way down.
Freescale (formerly Motorola) was purchased by NXP (formerly Phillips) in 2015. Qualcomm is in the process of buying NXP, although apparently there's been some difficulty getting it past the European regulators. Now it sounds like Qualcomm is going to get swallowed up by Broadcom. That's going to be a huge company.
Last year, Microchip bought Atmel, ADI bought Linear Tech, ON Semiconductor bought Fairchild, and Renesas bought Intersil. The year before, Intel bought Altera.
Any bets on the last two semiconductor conglomerates standing? I'm thinking Intel vs. Samsung. I hope whoever swallows up ON Semiconductor rebrands to the Fairchild name - there's almost something poetic about a reverse-Fairchildren split.
EDIT: I should also point out that "Broadcom" isn't really Broadcom anymore - Avago Technologies purchased Broadcom last year and took on the Broadcom name for itself. Avago was previously the semiconductor division of Agilent which in turn was a spinoff of Hewlett-Packard. Avago traces its lineage back to the semiconductor division of HP which was formed way back in 1961.