BloombergBusiness is reporting rumors that Texas Instruments is in talks to acquire Maxim Integrated. Both companies have declined to respond to this leaked information. Earlier this year there were rumors that the two companies had been in talks in 2014 that didn’t result with an agreement.
We find it interesting that the article mentions Maxim doesn’t need to scale — yet we often find Maxim parts in short supply. If TI were to acquire the company this could change for some Maxium parts. Still, this move looks a lot like TI trying to bolster its hold on the portions of the analog chip market which both companies currently occupy.
Already this year we’ve seen Dialog acquire Atmel, Avago acquire Broadcom, and the merger agreement between Freescale and NXP. We probably missed a few, and this has us wonder who is next. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
[Thanks Kumar]
TI chips are overpriced. I only buy fakes and they’ve never failed me.
Where do you go to buy fakes? Are they advertised as such?
If it’s from ebay and waaaaay cheaper then normal retailers, it’s most likely a knock-off…
Or a batch that failed specs. I buy them too, but would never trust them for anything critical.
I got some bad AD595’s off the ‘Bay from a seller called SharpSeller2000
From the sounds of it those will be TI devices soon…. :-/
If you think TI chips from legit distributors are expensive, Maxim ones are even more expensive. It is actually good news that TI is buying them. Hopefully that help the inventory issues with Maxim.
I was under the impression that Maxim makes small run “niche” products,
TI would probably just dump “all that piddly stuff”.
I wonder how the magazine “Maxim” will be affected. B^)
Meh, I don’t particularly like those big mergers. Sooner or later, we will end up with two or three huge semiconductor companies, NOT competing each other.
+1 Aggreed!
I thought MAXIM didn’t have very good chip life, (or whatever the correct terminology is), creating very niche parts with a very short market time.
I ordered a handful of chips a handful of years ago and misplaced the datasheets for them, now I can’t find them on their website since MAXIM felt it necessary to discontinue them. I’ve also seen a number of engineering notes explicitly stating NOT to use designs using MAXIM parts due to such a short production life. Vanilla parts not withstanding of course.
On a similar vein: Got courted by Fibocom last year to use their new fancy G535 GSM module (dual sim, built in Wifi and Bluetooth, very affordable). Between 2 companies I am involved with we quickly developed 3 products. Come pre-production time, we ask for updated pricing – no can do. “Uhh, sorry, the parts are EOL”. At least I have enough of the modules to use the prototypes ;)
Weird… I’ve taken apart laptops over a decade old with Maxim chips on ’em and had no trouble finding datasheets…
I think this is a good thing .. i have not used a maxim chip in awhile and i think TI is just what they need to get their shit together
I just read last week that Analog Devices and Maxim are in talk to merge/acquire…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-maxim-intg-analog-devices-idUSKCN0S82JT20151016
Maybe Bloomberg will acquire Reuters (or visa versa) and then everyone can get their story straight.
I often wonder if these leaks are someone intentionally trying to move the markets and make a bundle on the stock. But then again I’m prone to conspiracy.
So what you’re saying is that you are prone to reality?
Inlet acquired Altera on 1st June 2015…
Why so many merges?
Looks like everybody wants to get rich. Fast!
:o(
On paper there are several reasons.
If in different areas, to eventually through best practices reduce manufacturing costs and make more profit.
If in the same areas, remove a competitor and eventually merge products and sell/produce more at a higher margin, or if you have removed enough competitors jack up the price.
And in the short term the share price will go up, and eventually when they reduce their headcount there will be a second share price spike as well (these times are usually when shakers and movers in the know dump stock to make profit).
A problem that can occur for a merged company of similar product lines is when their major customers required dual sourcing of components, and now have to look elsewhere for the second source, or drop those components if no one else makes them.
TI acquired National Semiconductor in large part because NS hadn’t managed to budge their stock price in five years, and NS higher-ups decided the way to move the stock price was by using TI’s money. It also was, like microsoft buying a ton of small companies, a cheap way to avoid investing in research by just buying the product. TI seems to like acquiring companies who have processes that are painful to either duplicate or compete with.
Cruz Gubbment gonna raise interest rates on borrowed muny.
I have never ever designed a Maxim product into a device. Their lifetime buy comes about 1.5 years after rollout.
The semiconductor market is growing at an anemic 5% per year. Maxim does not have much in the way of new innovation. They support way to many processes that are largely underutilized. Samsung is their largest customer who is also dropping revenue. TI and other make similar parts to Maxim but at a lower price. Maxim is not meeting its revenue targets.
So, they are cheap to buy and TI can keep the wheat while culling the chaffe. Expect layoffs at maxim while TI runs those employees through the torture test.
What do you mean by processes that are underutilized?
Silicon fabs.Each fab will run a number of processes. High voltage. High Speed and so on If you run a lot of processes, and they are not used well, they are underutilized
Lattice buys Silicon Image, Intel buys Lantiq and Altera, MaxLinear buys Entropic Communications, Microsemi buys Vitesse, Uphill Investment buys ISSI, Microchip buys Micrel, Avago buys Broadcom, JAC Capital buys the NXP RF power unit, Tsinghua buys Mircon, AMS buys the NXP CMOS sensor unit, Dialog buys Atmel….
There is a log going on out there that is not even mentioned in the article. Please do some more research for your articles next time. These are just some examples of the chip domain, there are other mergers for example in the storage business there are talks that SanDisk will merge with Western Digital. And market analysts generally agree that the end of the flag pole in mergers is not reached yet…