By Nitin Dahad, EETimes (July 14, 2020)
The $21 billion acquisition of Maxim Integrated by Analog Devices ranks in the top three among mega-semiconductor company acquisitions in recent years (the others include Avago’s acquisition of Broadcom for $37 billion and SoftBank buying Arm for $32 billion).
With any acquisition, the final deal often has to answer the question: how do Analog Devices (ADI) and Maxim complement each other? This is the question we pondered at EE Times when we heard about the deal on Monday. The official statement said it would increase scale and diversification and enhance domain expertise and breadth of engineering capabilities to “develop more complete solutions to solve customers’ most complex problems.” But it wasn’t completely obvious what specific strengths of each company was being tapped into do what exactly, which motivated the proposed deal.