Siemens, Nordic Semiconductor, and SkyWater Technology have each completed strategic acquisitions across software, cloud, and foundry capacity.
www.allaboutcircuits.com, Jul. 09, 2025 –
Three recent, high-impact acquisitions show how software, silicon, and system lifecycle services are converging across key verticals. First, Siemens has taken a major step into life sciences with a $5.1 billion acquisition. Nordic Semiconductor positioned itself as a full-stack player in IoT device management. Finally, Skywater Technology is expanding its domestic foundry footprint with a new site in Texas, aimed squarely at critical infrastructure and defense needs.
Siemens has completed its acquisition of Boston-based Dotmatics, a scientific informatics company whose AI-native platform is already used by more than two million researchers. The $5.1 billion deal significantly expands Siemens’ PLM software into the life sciences domain and adds a suite of widely adopted tools into its growing Siemens Xcelerator software portfolio.
Dotmatics' flagship product, Luma, is an AI-native scientific intelligence platform designed to unify scientific workflows across a “make-test-decide” model. It aggregates structured and unstructured R&D data, such as molecular structures, assay results, and analytical outputs, into a single, queryable layer. That capability will now be integrated with Siemens’ digital twin infrastructure, giving customers a continuous data thread from lab discovery through manufacturing scale-up.
The goal is to tackle the growing data complexity in drug development pipelines, which routinely take over a decade and cost billions to bring a single new therapy to market. Siemens claims the combination could reduce time-to-clinic while supporting multi-modality drug programs, including cell and gene therapies.
For engineers, this points to a growing overlap between AI-assisted scientific modeling and traditional PLM. Siemens’ push into life sciences may also influence requirements around secure data handling, multi-domain simulation, and the use of edge AI in regulated production environments.
Nordic Semiconductor has acquired embedded observability startup Memfault in a $120 million deal aimed at delivering a vertically integrated chip-to-cloud solution for connected products. This is a strategic pivot for Nordic, long known for its ultra-low-power wireless SoCs, toward a full lifecycle management model for IoT device makers.
Memfault’s software stack includes features like crash reporting, real-time fleet health monitoring, remote debugging, and OTA firmware delivery. These tools support embedded Linux, Android, and MCU-class devices and are already in use across consumer, industrial, and healthtech deployments by customers such as Whoop, Bose, Panasonic, and Lyft.