News analysis: Acquisition strengthens Microsemi’s position in the supply chain
2 mins read
Timing, they say, is everything and it's certainly the case in the electronics industry. At the more sophisticated end of the consumer market, and in the telecomms, mobile comms and military sectors, the need for an accurate timing source is paramount.
Microsemi has been keen to expand its timing technology portfolio over the last couple of years. It bought Zarlink in October 2011 for some $500million and acquired Maxim's timing, synchronisation and synthesis business in January 2012 in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The latest move, made towards the end of 2013, was the $230m acquisition of Symmetricon. The move was said at the time to bring the world's leading source of highly precise timekeeping technologies into the Microsemi fold.
The result of this and the previous moves, Microsemi claims, is the industry's 'largest and most complete' timing product offering.
Russ Garcia, pictured, Microsemi's executive vice president of worldwide marketing, is also general manager of the company's frequency and time division. "What's important about this acquisition is that Microsemi now has timing technology that ranges from source and generation to sync in virtually any network."
One of Symmetricon's particular strengths is its chip scale atomic clock, or CSAC. "It's one of the key products," Garcia noted. "We can now put an atomic clock package on a board with timing circuitry and start plugging that into military radio networks, for example."
But the acquisition has a more strategic benefit. Garcia said the Zarlink acquisition brought key timing ICs with the highest performance. "Zarlink's focus was mainly on communications," he noted. "But the acquisition of Symmetricon takes us to another level; it gives us access to the sub systems and system level markets and ties us into the infrastructure. We can now take solutions at multiple levels to customers and we're finding strong feedback."
With the ability to offer complete systems, Microsemi can now talk directly with companies such as Cisco and Ericsson. "We have strong relationships with companies like Verizon and AT&T," Garcia continued, "as well as BT. Now, we can sell directly to them, as well as to their system integrators. It brings a strong advantage."
The strong timing portfolio also suggests the opportunity for some integration. "You can see where there are opportunities to take boards down to a couple of ICs and there will be more integration from box to board to IC," Garcia confirmed. "You'll see us driving innovation in this area." He also believes that Microsemi can bring silicon manufacturing efficiencies to bear, streamlining the electronics and reducing cost. "And we can now look at atomic clock ICs competing against OXCOs, for example."
Whether Symmetricon remains as a standalone group has yet to be decided: the last two big acquisitions took six months to a year to settle. "I'll be managing the organisation while things stablise," Garcia said. "But we'll be deciding whether it fits somewhere else in Microsemi or can it continue as a standalone."
