In 2019, a host of major acquisitions took place as the semiconductor industry looked to capitalize on gaining technology that would factor into future needs such as self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT) and embedded systems.
One of these was Nvidia's purchase of Mellanox Technologies in a $7 billion deal. That has now been finalized, uniting the companies’ data center computing and expanding its presence in data science and AI. With the deal finalized, Nvidia now has end-to-end technologies or AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors and the software needed for next-generation data centers.
This transaction is just another in a series of major acquisitions that happened in 2019. A key to the acquisition trend that occurred in 2019 was the forecast that the semiconductor industry will decline in revenues in 2020 by 7.2%. One of the biggest acquisitions of 2019 was Infineon’s purchase of semiconductor vendor Cypress for $10 billion, expanding Infineon’s range of applications and giving it a core library of microcontrollers and connectivity components.
However, many other smaller acquisitions have been happening, including Xilinx's purchase of Solarflare, Intel's purchase of FPGA maker Omnitek, Dialog’s purchase of Silicon Motion Technology and Taoglas’ acquisition of Think Wireless, an antenna maker for wireless systems inside vehicles. Marvell has also gotten in on the act with its acquisition of Avera and its Wi-Fi business acquired by NXP for $1.76 billion.
