Recently, the semiconductor industry has seen three acquisitions.

Qualcomm announced the acquisition of Foundries.io, a leading provider of IoT and cloud development security services, with its flagship product FoundriesFactory being well-regarded in the industry. Microchip Technology acquired Neuronix AI Labs to enhance its capabilities in developing highly efficient AI edge solutions on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Runjing Chemical, a developer of Tetramethylammonium Hydroxide (TMAH), announced the acquisition of two plants in China from Sumitomo Chemical, aiming to strengthen its competitiveness in the wet electronic chemical market in China.

• Runjing Acquired Sumitomo Chemical’s Two Plants

On April 16th, Runjing Chemical announced that it has acquired two plants in China from Sumitomo Chemical.

Runjing disclosed that it has reached an agreement on the full acquisition of Sumitomo Chemical’s subsidiaries, Sumitomo Chemical Electronic Materials (Hefei) Co., Ltd. and Sumitomo Chemical Electronic Materials (Chongqing) Co., Ltd., and both parties have completed the signing of the equity transfer contract.

Upon meeting the relevant items stipulated in the equity transfer contract, Hefei Sumitomo Chemical and Chongqing Sumitomo Chemical will become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Runjing.

Sumitomo Chemical, founded in 1913, has been engaged in the production of process chemicals for flat panel displays (FPD) in China since 2009. The two acquired subsidiaries focus on providing etchants, developers, and peelers with stable quality for downstream customers.

Founded in 2008, Runjing is a manufacturer of TMAH developer and offer products to major global panel manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, BOE, HKC, CSOT, and Tianma. In 2020, Runjing Technology established XINKE Electronic Materials in Hefei to produce high-purity semiconductor-grade products including hydrogen peroxide, ammonia water, and isopropanol, which has begun product introduction at its 12-inch fabs.

Runjing stated that through this acquisition, it will take over Sumitomo Chemical’s technological advantages and business network, enable it to quickly expand its product portfolio (Etchants, peelers, and CF developers, etc), and provide customers with a variety of comprehensive solutions, thereby enhancing Runjing’s competitiveness in the wet electronic chemical market in China.

• Qualcomm Acquired Foundries.io

Qualcomm recently disclosed its acquisition of Foundries.io in a press release regarding a WiFi product launch. Foundries.io is known as an open-source cloud-native platform provider, specializing in simplifying the complexity of developing Linux-based IoT and edge devices, and updating these devices.

Foundries.io was co-founded by executives and engineers. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, it is recognized as a pacesetter in its field. The company’s  cloud-native DevOps products fitted for interconnected embedded security devices can expedite time-to-market and reduce costs for OEMs across industries.

Foundries.io reportedly established close relationships with ARM and its chip partners, adopting ARM SystemReady technology. It has developed Linux distribution that is the first to fully integrate Project Cassini and provide commercial support for it. Project Cassini is an open, collaborative, and standards-based program by ARM.

• Microchip Acquired Neuronix AI Labs

According to Microchip Technology’s press release, Microchip Technology recently acquired Neuronix AI Labs to enhance its capabilities in developing high-efficiency, AI-supported edge systems on FPGA. Neuronix AI Labs delivers neural network sparse optimization technology, which can reduce power consumption, size, and computation for tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation while maintaining high accuracy.

Microchip’s mid-range PolarFire® FPGA and SoC are already ahead in the industry in terms of low power, reliability, and security features. Acquiring such neural network sparse optimization technology will enable Microchip to develop large-scale edge deployment components with high cost-effectiveness and efficiency, which are specifically designed for computer vision applications on systems requiring low cost, small size, and low power consumption, thus enabling AI to exponentially increasing ML processing capabilities on low-end and mid-end FPGA.

The acquisition also gives our traditional Microchip MCU and MPU clients the ability to use FPGAs as accelerators through an easy-to-use compiler that will substantially improve their design productivity and system performance while shortening their time to market

Bruce Weyer, Vice President of Microchip’s FPGA Business Unit, said, “This acquisition will improve the efficiency of our FPGA and SoC deployed in intelligent edge systems utilizing AI/ML algorithms.” He added, “Neuronix technology, combined with our VectorBlox design flow, can enhance neural network performance efficiency and delivers outstanding GOPS/Watt performance in our  PolarFire FPGA and SoC with low power consumption. System designers can now build and deploy small hardware, which was previously difficult to achieve due to limitations of size, heat, or power.”

The neural network sparse optimization technology will allow non-FPGA designers to leverage the powerful parallel processing capabilities of industry-standard AI frameworks without deep knowledge of FPGA design processes.

Neuronix AI intellectual property, coupled with Microchip’s existing compilers and software PDK, can achieve AI/ML algorithms on customizable FPGA logic without the need for specialized knowledge of Register Transfer Level (RTL) or a deep understanding of underlying FPGA architecture. It also allows for dynamic updates and upgrades of CNNs without reprogramming the hardware.

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