Finance

ARM has become one of the world’s most impressive technology success stories of the last 25 years, David Manners considers what its future may be under new ownership.

Renesas Electronics has agreed a deal to acquire Intersil for around $3.2bn.

Cambridge Medical Robotics is developing a medical robotics system which it claims can make surgery less invasive and open the way for universal keyhole techniques. The medical device firm started first clinical cadaveric trials last month and has now secured $20.3m venture funding to help commercialise its medical robotics technology. It also plans a recruitment programme. Investor, ABB, a global robotics ...

The proposed $32bn ARM takeover by Japanese firm SoftBank has caught the semiconductor market by surprise. Most observers believe that the processor IP which is the main ARM business was so important to so many chip makers that ARM’s independence was too strategically important to the market to be broken. As a result it was thought that its artificially high ...

Always wanting to be even-handed, we have been searching the electronics industry for someone who has presented an argument for Brexit. Last week, we published the pro-EU arguments from the president of the IET, but I have yet to find someone within the industry presenting the case for a vote for Brexit in June. Surely, there are good arguments both ...

Austria-based analogue semiconductor manufacturer, ams has announced that a US District Judge has awarded its US subsidiary, ams-TAOS  damages of $77m from Intersil, including $10m in exemplary damages. The decision comes after jurors in the federal Eastern District of Texas found in favour of ams-TAOS on all claims against Intersil for misappropriation of ams-TAOS’ trade secrets and breach of a ...

Apple has been ordered to pay damages of $234m to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s patent licensing research unit.

ST’s digital products division (DPG) has attracted interest from a potential acquirer, reports the French business magazine Challenges. However the potential acquirer may be no more welcome to ST employees than he is to the French finance ministry. The possible buyer is Yazid Sabeq, a former Commissioner for Diversity under the government of Nicolas Sarkozy who bought the French foundry ...

ARM has joined SRC’s Global Research Collaboration (GRC) programme. Research in the GRC programme focuses on current semiconductor industry priorities, including the continued scaling of semiconductor technologies and finding diverse applications for them. The programme has also expanded into new areas, including cybersecurity, technologies at the convergence of semiconductors and biology, novel approaches to energy-efficient computing, and the Internet of ...

ARM is positioning its top-end graphics IP – the Mali T-880 – as a virtual reality (VR) engine. “Smartphones are as big as we want them to be but more computational power is needed in the graphics and display to get more realism,” Mark Dickinson, ARM’s graphics general told electronics Weekly. “We want quality of pixels not quantity of pixels.” Although VR ...