With Anamika Sahu & Milind Gandhe, CPO at MINRO, IIIT, Bangalore
The semiconductor industry is facing some interesting times today. For almost a decade, the industry after several rounds of consolidation, as a notoriously fragmented industry, looked to gain some pricing power. The past few years have been marked by multi-billion-dollar deals such as NXP’s acquisition of Freescale, and Softbank’s acquisition of ARM. Some of these deals also ran into a storm of regulatory scrutiny – Broadcom had to drop its acquisition of Qualcomm. Product mix shifted from digital processors needed by the communication vertical, towards analog/mixed signal products that gave far better margins with limited R&D costs – witness Renesas’ relentless acquisition push for analog companies such as IDT and Intersil. With these acquisitions, the company has tried to position itself as a leader in Analog, instead of its traditional positioning as a leader in MCUs.
