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Business News 2005
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  • July 20. 2005:
    Broadcom Corp. has agreed to buy Ethernet processor company Siliquent Technologies Inc. for $76 million in cash.
  • June 24. 2005:
    Winbond Electronics Corp. has acquired serial flash maker NexFlash Technology Inc.
    Already a producer of low-density parallel flash memory products, Winbond aims to build an offering in serial flash memory products, which are lower in cost and popular in low densities for products such as printers, wireless LANs, set-top boxes, DVD drives, DSL and cable modems.
    Winbond first acquired 54% of Nexflash stock in January 2001. With the acquisition of the remaining 46% of Nexflash stock, Winbond will now own 100% stock shares of NexFlash.
  • June 21. 2005:
    SEMTECH CORPORATION, a leading producer of high performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductors, announced plans to acquire XEMICS SA, a fabless developer of ultra-low power analog, radio frequency (RF) and digital integrated circuits (IC).
    XEMICS is a research and development (R&D) intensive company with 77 employees, of which 56 are actively engaged in the area of R&D. The company is privately held and based in Switzerland. XEMICS applies its low-power, low-voltage design expertise across its core technologies -- sensor interfacing/data acquisition, 8-bit RISC microcontrollers, RF transceivers and audio Codecs. These capabilities are aimed at adding value in next generation, highly integrated battery powered wireless and sensing applications.
    XEMICS was established in 1997 as a spin out of the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology. CSEM, which is funded by both government and industry sources, carries out applied research and product development. XEMICS works closely with CSEM on commercializing new technologies and is expected to continue to do so after the acquisition.
    In calendar year 2004, XEMICS generated net sales of about $23 million, mostly from custom and standard IC products for battery powered applications, remote metering, embedded systems and medical devices. Gross margin during this period was 48 percent.
  • June 17. 2005:
    Integrated Device Technology, Inc. [IDT] and Integrated Circuit Systems, Inc. [ICS] announced the signing of a definitive agreement to combine the two companies in a strategic merger. The parties believe that the merger will allow the combined company to increase its ability to service the requirements of its customers and will provide a platform for growth within the communications, computing, and consumer markets.
    IDT is a global leader in semiconductor solutions for advanced network services. The product mix includes products optimized for communications applications, including telecom products, FIFOs, multi-ports, and timing solutions, high-performance digital logic and high-speed SRAMs.
    ICS is a world leader in the design, development, and marketing of silicon timing devices for communications, networking, computing, and digital multimedia applications.
  • June 16. 2005:
    AMI Semiconductor said that it has acquired the semiconductor division of Flextronics Inc. for $135 million in cash. Flextronics Semiconductor, which had been on the block for some time, specializes in custom mixed-signal products, imaging sensors and digital ASICs, including FPGA conversion products.
  • June 10. 2005:
    Zoran Corp. has completed the acquisition of Oren Semiconductor Ltd. Zoran acquired Oren's remaining outstanding stock for $44.6 million in cash and stock. Zoran previously owned 17 percent of Oren.
  • June 07. 2005:
    Electronics and test equipment maker Agilent Technologies Inc., which was spun off from Hewlett Packard Co., is looking to sell its semiconductor products division. The sale of the semiconductor group comes soon after Young K. Sohn, a former senior vice president of Agilent Technologies Inc. and former president of the semiconductor products group left the company.
  • May 31. 2005:
    Transmeta Corporation announced the signing of asset purchase and license agreements with Culture.com Technology Limited (Culturecom), a fully owned subsidiary of Culturecom Holdings Ltd), a Hong Kong based technology company. This transaction is subject to the completion of a number of conditions, including the receipt of a technology export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce, certain other third party consents and the signing of a related services agreement with Transmeta.
    Pursuant to these agreements, Transmeta has agreed to sell, through a combination of asset purchase and licensing agreements, its Crusoe™ product line to Culturecom. As part of this agreement, Culturecom will also license Transmeta's 130-nanometer Efficeon™ technology to make and sell Efficeon-based products in China.
  • May 31. 2005:
    Digi International® Inc. today announced the acquisition of Rabbit Semiconductor, Inc., formerly Z-World™, Inc., a privately held corporation and the manufacturer of the popular Rabbit™ line of microprocessors and microprocessor-based core modules and Z-World single board computers. The acquisition is a merger transaction for $49 million of cash.
  • May 25. 2005:
    Cirrus Logic Inc. has agreed to sell its digital video product line to Magnum Semiconductor Inc. Magnum Semiconductor would focus on digital video ICs for consumer applications such as DVD recorders, hard-disk-drive-based camcorders and network media adapters.
    The privately held company was formed by an investment group led by Investcorp and August Capital. Raj Singh from Investcorp and Andy Rappaport from August Capital are expected to join the board of Magnum Semiconductor.
  • May 19. 2005:
    Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. and The Dow Chemical Company announced that Sumitomo will purchase the LUMATION Light-Emitting Polymers (LEPs) business from Dow. Financial terms were not disclosed. Sumitomo's acquisition of LUMATION LEPs will strengthen the company's LEP technology-based business, in line with its strategy. Sumitomo has developed fluorescent and phosphorescent LEPs based on the company's long-established display material and conducting polymer technology. Sumitomo's blue-color material achieved 10,000 hours of brightness half-life. The material is ideal for a printing method, a much simpler and more cost effective production process for large-sized displays than the vacuum deposition method used for small-molecular OLEDs.
    LEPs are the critical light-emitting material in polymeric light-emitting diodes (pLEDs), which are one class of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The pLED technology offers many performance benefits over other technologies, such as Liquid Crystal Displays. pLEDs do not require a backlight and enable high-resolution, wide-viewing angle, high contrast, low voltage emissive displays. LEPs allow for the cost-effective production of both passive and active matrix, monochromatic, area color, and full color displays. Applications for pLED technology will include televisions, instrument panels and portable electronics such as mobile phones, digital cameras, camcorders, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), and MP3 players.
  • April 29. 2005:
    Pixelworks reported that is has agreed to acquire for $109 million cash all outstanding shares of Equator Technologies Inc., a fabless provider of programmable digital video and audio encoding and decoding products. Pixelworks said the transaction would close in the second quarter, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.
    Equator Technologies, a privately held fabless semiconductor company with 75 employees, founded in 1996, and headquartered in Campbell, Calif. is a leading provider of programmable digital video encoding and decoding solutions with its family of Broadband Signal Processor, or BSPTM, ICs.
    Equator is an emerging supplier to manufacturers of Internet Protocol television, or IPTV, set-top boxes that decode streaming digital video into standard video formats. Over the past nine years, Equator has pioneered programmable digital video encoding and decoding solutions for demanding applications to numerous manufacturers of video conferencing and security surveillance systems. The company also supplies programmable digital video encoding solutions to the Digital Video Broadcast Services market serving the satellite, cable and terrestrial broadcast industries.
  • April 27. 2005:
    Electronics distributor Avnet Inc. is acquiring competitor Memec Group in a stock and cash deal valued at about $676 million. Avnet said it will also assume about $194 million of Memec's net debt as part of the deal. Memec, a global semiconductor distributor, operates in 33 countries. Under terms of the agreement, Memec investors would receive about 24 million shares of Avnet common stock plus about $64 million in cash.
  • April 25. 2005
    Truck with $2 million of Maxim's chips hijacked in Malaysia.
    Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. has been notified that a truck, belonging to the NNR line, that was forwarding Maxim parts was hijacked in Malaysia on April 16. 2005. The stolen units, with a market value of approximately US $2,200,000 were untested. To avoid any difficulty that may occur due to the delivery issues that may arise from this hijacking, Maxim is in the process of notifying the customers for whom these parts were intended.
    These units appear complete as they have the markings already imprinted on them. However, they have not gone through Maxim's entire manufacturing process including final test. It is therefore possible that using these untested devices in systems could cause the systems to fail. The failure rate could be as high as 30%.
    The part numbers and date codes of the stolen units can be accessed via the Internet by going to this site.
  • April 15. 2005:
    TriQuint Semiconductor, Inc. and CyOptics, Inc., announced that they have entered into an agreement for TriQuint to sell its optoelectronics operation in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, and Matamoros, Mexico, to CyOptics, a private optical components manufacturer headquartered in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. The sale is an asset sale including the products, manufacturing equipment, inventory, the Mexican entity, related intellectual property rights and other assets that constitute the operation that manufactures indium phosphide (InP) optical chips and components for the optical networking market. TriQuint will continue to support current optical customers and products based on gallium arsenide not associated with the operations in Pennsylvania and Mexico. CyOptics plans to employ the vast majority of TriQuint's approximately 100 employees in Pennsylvania and approximately 150 employees in Mexico.
    CyOptics develops, designs and manufactures optical engines for broadband metro and access communications solutions.
  • April 14. 2005:
    Spansion, the flash memory venture of AMD and Fujitsu, announced it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its class A common stock, likely indicating AMD is jettisoning its unprofitable memory unit. The number of shares to be offered and the estimated price range for the common stock have not been determined.
    With the flash memory market plagued by a capacity glut and falling prices, memory suppliers have undergone rough sledding in recent months, Spansion being no exception.
    Spansion manufactures NOR flash memory, a key component of mobile phone handsets. However, the technology is increasingly threatened by NAND flash.
  • April 13. 2005:
    Flash memory specialist Silicon Storage Technology (SST) Inc. is acquiring Actrans Systems of Taiwan for about $20 million in stock and cash. The privately-held Actrans Systems is a Taiwanese startup focusing on flash memory and EEPROMs. SST said it plans to incorporate Actrans' split-gate NAND flash technology into its lineup of licensable IP. The company's engineers will be merged into SST's Standard Memory Product Group, working in both Taiwan and the U.S.
  • April 12. 2005:
    Golden Gate Capital and TDK U.S.A. Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan-based TDK Corporation and regional headquarters for TDK's operations in the Americas, announced that Golden Gate Capital has acquired TDK Semiconductor Corporation for an undisclosed sum.
    The acquired company will continue to be led by the current management team and its headquarters and operations will remain based in Irvine, California. The acquired company will continue to be called TDK Semiconductor Corporation for a short transition period until a new name has been established. The company is a leader in the design and manufacture of advanced analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit products for consumer, communications, and industrial applications for a large number of global leading customers.
  • April 07. 2005:
    Exar Corporation announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Infineon Technologies North America Corp. in which Exar has agreed to acquire for cash a significant part of Infineon's Optical Networking(ON) Business Unit. The acquisition includes assets relating to the multi-rate TDM framer products, Fiber Channel over SONET/SDH, Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), as well as certain intellectual property for Data over SONET products. The transaction is expected to close shortly.
  • March 31. 2005:
    SMSC acquired fabless semiconductor company Oasis SiliconSystems AG for US$94 in cash stock.
    Oasis develops and markets integrated circuits for networking multimedia devices in automobiles. The company's media oriented systems transport (MOST) technology enables transport of digital audio, video, packet-based data and control information among automobiles.
  • March 28. 2005:
    Methode Electronics, Inc., a global manufacturer of electronic component and subsystem devices, announced its acquisition of Cableco Technologies Corporation. Cableco, located in Dublin, California, designs and manufactures high-current, flexible cabling systems for electronic and electrical power applications.
  • March 08. 2005:
    Agere Systems announced that it has acquired Modem-Art Ltd., a privately held developer of advanced processor technology for 3G/UMTS mobile devices, for $145.1 million in cash and stock.
  • February 25. 2005:
    Intel Corp. has agreed to buy Oplus Technologies Inc., a fabless provider of video processing products and technologies for digital television and digital displays. Oplus Technologies Inc. successfully launched two chips on the market, called Rembrandt and Matisse, which were designed into plasma displays, LCD-TVs and digital projectors. Oplus currently sells three lines of video processors targeted at the full spectrum of digital televisions and digital displays. The company, which has approximately 100 employees, will continue selling products under the Oplus brand name and will report into the Intel Consumer Electronics Group.
  • February 18. 2005:
    Texas Instruments Inc. said that it has sold its liquid-crystal display IC driver unit to Japan's Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd.
    Under the agreement, TI plans to complete the transfer of this Japan-based semiconductor product line to Oki (Tokyo) by the end of March 2005. About 50 employees from TI's operations in Japan will transfer to Oki.
    The unit designs integrated circuits that drive LCD displays with a diagonal size of 5 inches or more.
  • January 19. 2005:
    Sony Corporation and Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) have agreed on the basic terms of a transaction whereby Sony will acquire CMO's wholly-owned Japanese subsidiary, International Display Technology (IDTech).
    Sony and CMO have agreed that Sony will purchase all the shares of a new company spun-off from IDTech. Sony plans to produce low-temperature polysilicon thin film transistor liquid crystal (LTPS-TFT-LCD) display panels in the new company. The acquisition price has been set at approximately 18.5 Billion Japanese Yen for all the shares of the new company and includes purchase of all of the production equipment, facilities, and personnel at IDTech's plant in Yasu-shi, Shiga prefecture, Japan.
    IDTech is a world leader in the design, development, and production of amorphous silicon thin film transistor liquid crystal (a-Si TFT LCD) displays. Among IDTech's leading edge products are the world's highest resolution TFT LCDs for medical displays, wide-angle view in-plane switching (IPS) display monitors, twisted nematic LCD notebook displays, and specialized TFT substrates.
    The IDTech facility will complement Sony's present LTPS-TFT-LCD manufacturing base, which was established in 1997 as the STLCD Corporation, a joint venture between Sony and Toyota Industries Corporation, for the production of LTPS TFT LCD display panels for mobile products, such as cell phones and cameras. A second production line at STLCD was completed in 2002 in which production was expanded to 40,000 (600x720mm) base plates per month; Sony expects to continue the expansion of production and its acquisition of IDTech is part of those plans.
  • January 11. 2005:
    Infineon Technologies is blaming long delays in filing documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its decision to abandon the proposed sale of its laser and fiber optics subassembly business to Finisar Corp.
  • Archived News Pages:
    Business News 2004
    Business News 2003
    Business News 2002
    Business News 2001
    Business News 2000
    Sorry, because of a major crash we lost the News Files from July 21 2005 until February 1 2007. We couldn't recover the datafiles.

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