Finance

Fab equipment spending increased almost 20% in 2014 and will rise 15% in 2015, says SEMI.

NXP Semiconductors’ $12bn acquisition of Freescale Semiconductor will create the largest supplier of microcontrollers in the market. This is good news for ARM, because more than half the combined MCU product ranges are designed around on the Cambridge-based processor company’s cores. NXP’s own LPC range of ARM Cortex-M series microcontrollers will sit along the Freescale Kinetis range of Cortex-M chips. ...

January semiconductor sales were $28.5 billion, 8.7% higher than January 2014 and 2% less than December, reports SIA.

Today the world has a new semiconductor company – Socionext

Infineon has raised €800 million in the bond market to pay off the debt incurred by acquiring IR.

NXP is going to buy Freescale for $11.1 billion. Freescale still has $5.5 billion of debt left over from the $10 billion debt imposed on it by Blackstone in 2006 when the private equity company took it over.

ARM has developed an approach for an Intelligent Flexible Cloud (IFC) environment to meet the latency, power and size constraints for next-generation networks.

For many years UK companies have not taken part in EU R&D programmes. This is partly because of UK government meannesss about funding, partly because of UK government imposition of restrictions and partly because of the perceived complications of the paperwork.

ARM has expanded its technical training portfolio to include live courses that can be remotely-delivered in any location. The courses will provide a flexible and fast-response training service for companies and individuals, allowing them to take full advantage of ARM technology features.

NXP and China state-owned investment company JianGuang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) have signed an agreement with the intention to establish a joint venture (JV) in China.