Despite the distraction caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, consolidation in the electronics and semiconductor industries remained a driver in 2020. It was a year full of deals and blockbusters, although which ones will surpass the U.S.-China trade war remains an open question. As the importance of the Chinese market continues to increase, it may be difficult to complete an important transaction without China's approval.

The following summarizes 12 transactions that occurred in the global semiconductor industry this year, roughly arranged in chronological order:

1) SK Hynix acquires wafer foundry

South Korea's SK Hynix is ​​a major DRAM and NAND flash memory manufacturer, but it has been preparing for a rainy day and has been diversifying its operations, including logic chips, to improve its risk resistance. In March 2020, SK Hynix acquired MagnaChip foundry, an established company and wafer factory.

2) NXP helps Globalfoundries

This is not an M&A transaction, but an intra-European business integration.

Europe is notoriously lacking in leading semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, with the closest ones being Intel in Ruislip, Ireland, and Globalfoundries in Dresden, Germany.

NXP Semiconductors helped the global company pass the necessary tests at its wafer fab in Dresden. In April, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) certified the Dresden-based Global Foundation website as compliant with common standards. This enables Globalfoundries to produce chips for financial transactions, smart cards, and digital IDs for the public sector, which require additional security and integrity during the production process.

3) "The Voice of Money"

In the past few years, people have been rushing to enter the audio product market. In June, wireless chipset supplier DSP Group Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) bid for SoundChip SA (Lausanne, Switzerland), a Swiss audio specialist, to gain expertise in noise cancellation.

4) UltraSoC sold to Siemens/Mentor

In June 2020, the British company UltraSoC was acquired by Mentor Graphics (Siemens acquired Mentor in 2016).

Cambridge-based UltraSoC develops technology for real-time monitoring and analysis of chip-level processing, which can be used for cybersecurity, functional safety and performance optimization. In some ways, a merger with Moortec could be a better outcome for the UK and Europe.

5) ADI buys Maxim

In July this year, ADI acquired Maxim for US$21 billion and is not expected to be completed until mid-2021.

6) China acquires German fabless chip company

Shenzhen Goodix is ​​not well-known in the West, but it is one of the top ten fabless chip companies in China. In 2020, the EU and national governments began to talk about the strategic significance of domestic semiconductor capabilities. In August, Goodix acquired Dream Chip Technologies GmbH (Hannover, Germany), a company with a 30-year legacy dating back to the 1990 formation of Sikan by the Lower Saxony state government.

7) Nvidia acquires Arm

SoftBank agreed to sell ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion, which will be the largest merger and acquisition transaction in the semiconductor industry.

However, as tensions between China and the United States have not yet eased, whether a deal can be successfully concluded in 2021 is far from certain.

8) AMD acquires Xilinx

In October this year, AMD bid $35 billion to acquire Xilinx, the inventor of FPGAs.

Intel completed its acquisition of Altera in December 2015. The AMD-Xilinx combination will challenge Intel's leading position in the data center.

The deal is expected to close by the end of 2021 but, like ADI-Maxim and ARM-Nvidia, is subject to regulatory approval.

9) Intel sells NAND flash memory business

Intel has a strange relationship with the flash memory business, and rumors suggest that while it's very keen on its 3D Xpoint non-volatile flash memory business, it's having trouble turning a profit. At the same time, in October, it announced that it would withdraw from the NAND flash memory market and sold it to SK Hynix, but the delivery would not be completed until 2025.

10) Marvell acquires Inphi

This is a huge $8 billion deal.

11) Moortec sold to Synopsys

In November 2020, another British chip monitoring company, Moortec, was sold to EDA giant Synopsys. Plymouth-based IP vendor Moortec is named for its chip monitoring technology, which specializes in process, voltage and temperature (PVT) sensor design. After the deal, its chance to compete with UltraSoC was missed.

12) Indie Semi goes public through reverse merger

The name Indie Semi is not widely known. The company is also a small company in California, but it has been at the top of the production of multi-chip components and is used in automotive semiconductors. Despite losing money in 2019, it almost certainly plans to go public via a reverse merger in 2020.

To summarize, whatever the fate of the electronics and semiconductor industries, and the fate of humanity in general, there are always deals to be made, money to be made, or money to be lost.

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