mergers and acquisitions

17 Articles

Microchip Acquires Microsemi For $8.35B

March 2, 2018 by 37 Comments

Microchip has acquired Microsemi for $8.35 Billion dollars. Rumors of this acquisition were floating around earlier this week, but now the deal is done.

This acquisition is the latest in a years-long process of consolidation in the silicon industry. Previously, Broadcom attempted a hostile takeover of Qualcomm for One… Hundred… Billion dollars. Lattice would have been bought if the deal wasn’t shut down for national security concerns. Of course, Microchip bought Atmel in a deal likened to the fall of Constantinople, NXP and Freescale merged, Intel bought Altera, Linear and Analog are one, and On Semiconductor acquired Fairchild.

With the acquisition of Microsemi, Microchip will be looking to add a few interesting components and capabilities to their portfolio. In contrast to Microchip’s portfolio, you won’t find many Microsemi parts on a hacker’s workbench; they’re dealing with stuff like optical networking and avionics. Closer to home, they have a large line of FPGAs and some nice frequency synthesizers.

Of course, there are slightly cooler components in Microsemi’s portfolio. If you’ve ever wanted a rad-tolerant telemetry controller for reaction wheels and thruster assemblies, they’ve got your back. Just connect that to Microchip’s rad-hard Arduino and you have a complete satellite built from Microchip parts.

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Hackaday Links: February 11, 2018

February 11, 2018 by 20 Comments

Are you a student? Are you part of a hackerspace? We have a contest going on right now where you can win a fancy new Prusa i3 MK3. The Repairs You Can Print contest is a challenge to do something useful with that machine that spits out tugboats. We’re looking for functional repairs of items around your house, office, or garage. Did you repair something with a 3D printer? Then you too can get in on the action! Enter now! Check out the entries!

You may know Flite Test as the group who do everything surrounding remote control flight (mostly fixed wings, a nice counter to the quadification of the hobby over the last few years). Flite Test designs and sells airplanes made out of Dollar Tree foam board, they have yearly, bi-coastal meetups, and they’re all-around awesome dudes. Now, they want to build the Disneyland of RC flight. [Josh Bixler], the face of Flite Test and a guy who has a plane named after him, wants to buy a golf course and turn it into the world’s best RC flying park, with a ~2000 foot grass strip for general aviation. We’re looking at their crowdfunding campaign, and it looks promising it might be funded by the time this goes live.

A while ago, [Peter Jansen], the guy who built a tricorder and a laser-cut CT scanner, made a magnetic camera. This Hall Effect camera is a camera for magnetism instead of light. Now, this camera has been fully built and vastly improved. He’s capturing ‘frames’ of magnetism in a spinning fan at 2000 Hz (or FPS, terminology kind of breaks down here), and it’s beautiful.

Oh thank God we can finally buy GPUs again. Try buying them with Bitcoin.

In the last few years, CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has expanded. Originally, this was one of the treaties that banned the import or export of rhino horn, but recently this expanded to the export of rosewood thanks to increased demand in China for rosewood furniture. The laws of unintended consequences kicked into effect, and importing anything made out of rosewood is now a mess of permits and inspections at the border, including musical instruments. Travelling orchestras, for example, are at risk of having their string section confiscated because of rosewood tuning pegs. Cooler minds may now be prevailing, and there’s some hope the regulations may be changed during the next meeting of the CITES convention next year.

As noted a few months ago, there was a possibility of Broadcom buying Qualcomm for one… hundred… Billion dollars. This offer was rejected, with Qualcomm saying the offer wasn’t high enough. Broadcom fired back with an offer of $82 per share, or $121B. This offer was rejected this week.

Need some EMC testing? [Zach]’s got your back. He’s reserved some time in a 10m EMC chamber for testing NeuroBytes this week. If you have an Open Source project that needs a pre-test scan for unintentional radiator, you can get in on the action. This is just a pre-test, you’re not getting certification, and you’re not going to test anything with radios, and you need to ship [Zach] your stuff. But still, free test time. Woo.

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Hackaday Links: November 19, 2017

November 19, 2017 by 26 Comments

[Peter]’s homebuilt ultralight is actually flying now and not in ground effect, much to the chagrin of YouTube commenters. [Peter Sripol] built a Part 103 ultralight (no license required, any moron can jump in one and fly) in his basement out of foam board from Lowes. Now, he’s actually doing flight testing, and he managed to build a good plane. Someone gifted him a ballistic parachute so the GoFundMe for the parachute is unneeded right now, but this gift parachute is a bit too big for the airframe. Not a problem; he’ll just sell it and buy the smaller model.

Last week, rumors circulated of Broadcom acquiring Qualcomm for the sum of One… Hundred… Billion Dollars. It looks like that’s not happening now. Qualcomm rejected a deal for $103B, saying the offer, ‘undervalued the company and would face regulatory hurdles.’ Does this mean the deal is off? No, there are 80s guys out there who put the dollar signs in Busine$$, and there’s politicking going on.

A few links posts ago, I pointed out there were some very fancy LED panels available on eBay for very cheap. The Barco NX-4 LED panels are a 32×36 panels of RGB LEDs, driven very quickly by some FPGA goodness. The reverse engineering of these panels is well underway, and [Ian] and his team almost have everything figured out. Glad I got my ten panels…

TechShop is gone. With a heavy heart, we bid adieu to a business with a whole bunch of tools anyone can use. This leaves a lot of people with TechShop memberships out in the cold, and to ease the pain, Glowforge, Inventables, Formlabs, and littleBits are offering some discounts so you can build a hackerspace in your garage or basement. In other TechShop news, the question on everyone’s mind is, ‘what are they going to do with all the machines?’. Nobody knows, but the smart money is a liquidation/auction. Yes, in a few months, you’ll probably be renting a U-Haul and driving to TechShop one last time.

3D Hubs has come out with a 3D Printing Handbook. There’s a lot in the world of filament-based 3D printing that isn’t written down. It’s all based on experience, passed on from person to person. How much of an overhang can you really get away with? How do you orient a part correctly? God damned stringing. How do you design a friction-fit between two parts? All of these techniques are learned by experience. Is it possible to put this knowledge in a book? I have no idea, so look for that review in a week or two.

Like many of us, I’m sure, [Adam] is a collector of vintage computers. Instead of letting them sit in the attic, he’s taking gorgeous pictures of them. The collection includes most of the big-time Atari and Commodore 8-bitters, your requisite Apples, all of the case designs of the all-in-one Macs, some Pentium-era PCs, and even a few of the post-97 Macs. Is that Bondi Blue? Bonus points: all of these images are free to use with attribution.

Nvidia is blowing out their TX1 development kits. You can grab one for $200. What’s the TX1? It’s a really, really fast ARM computer stuffed into a heat sink that’s about the size of a deck of cards. You can attach it to a MiniITX breakout board that provides you with Ethernet, WiFi, and a bunch of other goodies. It’s a step above the Raspberry Pi for sure and is capable enough to run as a normal desktop computer.

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Hackaday Links: Remember, Remember

November 5, 2017 by 16 Comments

Buckle up, buttercup because this is the last weekly Hackaday Links post you’re getting for two weeks. Why? We have a thing next weekend. The Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th (and also the 10th, because there’s a pre-game party), and it’s going to be the best hardware con you’ve ever seen. Don’t have a ticket? Too bad! But we’ll have something for our Internet denizens too.

So, you’re not going to the Hackaday Supercon but you’d like to hang out with like-minded people? GOOD NEWS! Barnes & Noble is having their third annual Mini Maker Faire on November 11th and 12th. Which Barnes & Noble? A lot of them. Our reports tell us this tends to be geared more towards the younger kids, but there are some cool people doing demonstrations. Worst case scenario? You can pick up a copy of 2600.

PoC || GTFO 0x16 is out! Pastor Laphroaig Races The Runtime Relinker And Other True Tales Of Cleverness And Craft! This PDF is a Shell Script That Runs a Python Webserver That Serves a Scala-Based JavaScript Compiler With an HTML5 Hex Viewer; or, Reverse Engineer Your Own Damn Polyglot.

In, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be stupid’ news, I received an interesting product announcement this week. It’s a USB C power bank with an integrated hand warmer. Just think: you can recharge your phone on the go, warm your hands in the dead of winter, and hope your random battery pack from China doesn’t explode in your pocket. I’m not linking to this because it’s that dumb.

You can now cross-compile ARM with GCC in Visual Studio.

The iPhone X is out, and that means two things. There are far too many YouTube videos of people waiting in line for a phone (and not the good kind), and iFixit did a teardown. This thing is glorious. There are two batteries and a crazy double-milled PCB stack with strange and weird mezzanine connectors. The main board for the iPhone X is completely unrepairable, but it’s a work of engineering art. No word yet on reusing the mini-Kinect in the iPhone X.

Speaking of irreparable computers, the Commodore 64 is not. [Drygol] recently came across a C64 that was apparently the engine controller for a monster truck found on the bottom of the ocean. This thing was trashed, filled with rust and corrosion, and the power button just fell off. Prior to cleaning, [Drygol] soldered a new power button, bowered it up, and it worked. The crappiest C64 was repairable. A bit of cleaning, painting the case, and the installation of an SD2IEC brought this computer back to life, ready for another thirty years of retrogaming and BASIC.

The Zynq from Xilinx is one of the most interesting parts in recent memory. It’s a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 combined with an FPGA with a little more than a million reconfigurable gates. It’s been turned into a synth, a quadcopter, all of British radio, and it’s a Pynq dev board. Now there’s a new part in the Zynq family, an RFSoC that combines the general ARM/FPGA format with some RF wizardry. It’s designed for 5G wireless and radar (!), and one of those parts we can’t wait to see in use.

Do you keep blowing stuff up when attaching a USB to UART adapter to a board? Never fear, because here’s one with galvanic isolation. This is done with a neat digital isolator from Maxim

Mergers And Acquisitions: Broadcom, Qualcomm, And One Hundred Billion Dollars

November 5, 2017 by 76 Comments

Rumors have been circulating this last weekend of the largest semiconductor acquisition ever. Broadcom might buy Qualcomm for the princely sum of one hundred Billion dollars.

You will most likely be familiar with both Qualcomm and Broadcom for their wireless and cellphone chipsets. As far as the Maker community is concerned, Broadcom makes the chipset for the Raspberry Pi, but in the context of a two hundred Billion dollar company, a ‘maker’ focused Linux dev board is the equivalent of a rounding error on a balance sheet.

This news comes a little more than a year after the announcement that Qualcomm is snatching up NXP, and two years after the news of NXP is merging with Freescale. The industry is in a state of consolidation.

This proposed deal follows several other semiconductor mergers and acquisitions including NXP and Freescale, Intel and Altera, Avago and Broadcom, On Semiconductor and Fairchild, and the one we’re most befuddled with, Atmel and Microchip. Why are these companies merging? Because they’re sitting on mountains of cash. All of these mergers with the exception of Avago and Broadcom, have been for single-digit Billions of dollars. The merger of Broadcom and Qualcomm — if it happens — will be the largest merger of two semiconductor companies ever. That’s easy to do when both Broadcom and Qualcomm are on the top ten list of largest semiconductor companies, but it is evidence enough that the mergers and acquisitions in the industry are not slowing down.

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Hackaday Links: September 17, 2017

September 17, 2017 by 51 Comments

BREAKING NEWS: APPLE HAS RELEASED A NEW RECTANGLE. IT IS BETTER THAN THE PREVIOUS RECTANGLE, WHICH WAS A LESSER RECTANGLE. SOME PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE NEW RECTANGLE BECAUSE OF [[CHANGES]]. THE NEW RECTANGLE HAS ANIMATED POO.

Mergers and acquisitions? Not this time. Lattice Semiconductor would have been bought by Canyon Bridge — a private equity firm backed by the Chinese government — for $1.3B. This deal was shut down by the US government because of national security concerns.

[Jan] is the Internet’s expert in doing synths on single chips, and now he has something pretty cool. It’s a breadboard synth with MIDI and CV input. Basically, what we’re looking at is [Jan]’s CVS-01 chip for a DCO, DCF, and DCA), a KL5 chip for an LFO, and an envelope chip. Tie everything together with a two-octave captouch keyboard, and you have a complete synthesizer on a breadboard.

As an aside relating to the above, does anyone know what the cool kids are using for a CV/Gate keyboard controller these days? Modular synths are making a comeback, but it looks like everyone is running a MIDI keyboard into a MIDI-CV converter. It seems like there should be a –simple, cheap– controller with quarter-inch jacks labeled CV and Gate. Any suggestions?

World leaders are tweeting. The Canadian PM is awesome and likes Dark Castle.

Way back in July, Square, the ‘POS terminal on an iPad’ company posted some data on Twitter. Apparently, fidget spinner sales peaked during the last week of May, and were declining through the first few weeks of summer. Is this proof the fidget spinner fad was dead by August? I have an alternate hypothesis: fidget spinner sales are tied to middle schoolers, and sales started dropping at the beginning of summer vacation. We need more data, so if some of you could retweet this, that would be awesome.

Remember [Peter Sripol], the guy building an ultralight in his basement? This is going to be a five- or six-part video build log, and part three came out this week. This video features the installation of the control surfaces, the application of turnbuckles, and hardware that is far too expensive for what it actually is.

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Hackaday Links: November 6, 2016

November 6, 2016 by 17 Comments

Here’s a life protip for you: get really, really good at one video game. Not all of them; you only want to be good – top 10% at least – at one video game. For me, that’s Galaga. It’s a great arcade game, and now it’s IoT. [justin] has been working on publishing high scores from a Galaga board to the Internet. The electronics are actually pretty simple – just a latch on a memory address, and an ESP8266 for comms.

On with the mergers and acquisitions! Lattice has been sold to Canyon Bridge, a Chinese private equity firm, for $1.3 Billion. Readers of Hackaday should know Lattice as the creators of the iCE40 FPGA platform, famously the target of the only Open Source FPGA toolchain.

The Internet of Chocolate Chip Cookies. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter for a cookie machine, because buying a tube of pre-made cookie dough is too hard. There is one quote I would like to point out in this Kickstarter: “Carbon Fiber Convection Heating Element (1300W) is more energy-efficient than traditional electric elements and heats up instantly.” Can someone please explain how a heating element can be more efficient? What does that mean? Aren’t all resistive heating elements 100% efficient by default? Or are they 0% efficient? The Internet of Cookies broke my brain.

The USB Rubber Ducky is a thumb-drive sized device that, when plugged into a computer, presents itself as a USB HID keyboard, opens up a CLI, inputs a few commands, and could potentially do evil stuff. The USB Rubber Ducky costs $45, a Raspberry Pi Zero and a USB connector costs $6. [tim] built his own USB Rubber Ducky, and the results are great.