NXP Semiconductors NV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has agreed to acquire the wearables and Bluetooth Low Energy IC business of Quantic Corp.
Quantic Corp. is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2005 by Xiaodong Jin and Patrick Xuan, who were previously with Marvell Semiconductor and Yi-Feng Zhang, who previously designed wireless transceivers for Philips Semiconductors. The company has worked on the development of SoCs for wearables and associated application software to be hosted on smartphones and tablet computers.
The price NXP will pay was not disclosed and nor was it disclosed whether Quintic will continue to operate and or in what areas. However, the company's leaders are expected to join NXP at the close of the transaction, which is expected in the first quarter of 2015.
Quintic has approximately 65 engineers across sites in China at Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and in Sunnyvale, California. Significant IP assets, including more than 60 US and Chinese patents are included in the deal. NXP said that the acquisition would make it the leader in the wearable and Bluetooth LE markets.
"Quintic has impressive customer traction with its standalone BTLE solutions, especially in the Chinese ecosystem that it operates in, and is a leader in developing innovative integrated solutions for the nascent wearables market. With NXP’s strength in ultra-low power microcontrollers and security, broad IoT application solutions offering, and global sales and distribution reach, the acquired Quintic business should become a true leader in its market," said Mark Hamersma, general manager of emerging business at NXP. "With this transaction, NXP now offers the complete range of ultra-low power connectivity standards relevant to the Internet-of-Things, being NFC, Zigbee and BTLE," he added.
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