ON Semiconductor buys semiconductor manufacturer Fairchild
ON Semiconductor has acquired Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4 billion. This brings one of the oldest names in the semiconductor world into the hands of ON Semiconductor.
That is what the companies say in a press release. The acquisition will enable ON Semiconductor to offer a broader product portfolio. The companies complement each other well in this, according to the CEO of ON Semiconductor. ON Semiconductor pays $20 per share. It is estimated that the combined revenue will be around $5 billion per year.
ON Semiconductor was founded in 1999 and manufactures various products including asics, ulp memory, cmos image sensors, power management systems such as ac/dc controllers, logic circuits, amplifiers, analog switches, optical and touch sensors. Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 as part of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, after which it plunged into building integrated circuits and transistors. In the late 1970s, the company was bought by oil production affiliate Schlumberger, who sold it back to National Semiconductor in 1987. Ten years later, Fairchild became its own company again.
Fairchild was the first company to introduce a CCD in 1973. The image sensors are now housed at Fairchild Imaging. Fairchild also released an 8-bit processor, the F8. It also entered the video game market in 1976 with the Fairchild Video Entertainment System or VES and later Channel F with the F8 processor. After the arrival of the Atari 2600, the system quickly lost popularity. After the acquisition by Schlumberger, an artificial intelligence branch was set up and a 32-bit processor architecture was also designed with the name Clipper, which culminated in the C100 chip in 1986.
When the company was back on its own feet in 1987, it took over Samsung’s mosfet division in the late 1990s and Fairchild went public again in 1999. It acquired another mosfet company, Intersil, after which it became the world’s second largest supplier of mosfets. It took over a few more companies in the meantime before being taken over by ON Semiconductor on November 18 this year.
The acquisition is further supervised by Deutsche Bank, Morrison & Foerster, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.