Apple Inks $600 Million Deal To Acquire Assets and Talent From Dialog Semiconductor (techcrunch.com) 28
In an effort to build faster, more efficient chips, Apple is paying a total of $600 million to Dialog Semiconductor, a chipmaker based out of Europe that it's been working with since the first iPhone. According to TechCrunch, Apple is paying $300 million in cash to buy a portion of the company, including licensing power-management technologies, assets, and more than 300 employees, as well as "committing a further $300 million to make purchases from the remaining part of Dialog's business." From the report: While Dialog is describing this as an asset transfer and licensing deal, it will be Apple's biggest acquisition by far in terms of people: 300 people will be joining Apple as part of it, or about 16 percent of Dialog's total workforce. From what we understand, those who are joining have already been working tightly with Apple up to now. The teams joining are based across Livorno in Italy, Swindon in England, and Nabern and Neuaubing in Germany, near Munich, where Apple already has an operation.
In some cases, Apple will be taking over entire buildings that had been owned by Dialog, and in others they will be colocating in buildings where Dialog will continue to develop its own business â" another sign of how closely the two have and will continue to work together. The Dialog employees Apple is picking up in this acquisition will report to Apple's SVP of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji. Dialog says post the acquisition, the remaining part of the business will focus more on IoT, as well as mobile, automotive, computing and storage markets, specifically as a provider of custom and configurable mixed-signal integrated circuit chips.
In some cases, Apple will be taking over entire buildings that had been owned by Dialog, and in others they will be colocating in buildings where Dialog will continue to develop its own business â" another sign of how closely the two have and will continue to work together. The Dialog employees Apple is picking up in this acquisition will report to Apple's SVP of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji. Dialog says post the acquisition, the remaining part of the business will focus more on IoT, as well as mobile, automotive, computing and storage markets, specifically as a provider of custom and configurable mixed-signal integrated circuit chips.
You cannot "acquire talent" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's always funny to see companies buy other companies, hoping to buy their workers, too. This is especially hilarious when you see some ancient corporation buy up some startup that has little to its name but the people working there.
Newsflash: If these people wanted to work for ancient corporations with miles of red tape, they could. The first thing you'll see happen here is the actual talent jumping ship and moving on to the next one.
Re: (Score:1)
Apple aren't designing their own GPU, they're making incremental improvements to the GPU design that took Imagination's british engineers well over a decade to make. Apple sucked Imagination dry for everything they had and what their best and most valuable engineers knew, and then left Imagination's dry husk behind.
Apple has not designed their own GPU, period.
Re: You cannot "acquire talent" (Score:1)
What does health insurance have to do with a job?
Re:You cannot "acquire talent" (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like most of the bods Apple is buying are already mostly working on Apple stuff before the sale. We'll see but if Apple intends to keep them, it won't make many changes...nor does it seem they need to.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Newsflash: If these people wanted to work for ancient corporations with miles of red tape, they could. The first thing you'll see happen here is the actual talent jumping ship and moving on to the next one.
With these deals the top technical talent that come over typically gets large retention bonuses their first couple of years - something on the order of 25%+ of their salary - in addition to regular annual bonuses. They may not want to work for a megacorp but they would be hard-pressed to find a better compensation package elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn’t Apple already have a strong track record in doing exactly that, and in this sector, no less? The best example would be Imagination. Fast forward a few years after that buyout and those hardware engineers were the ones designing Apple’s A-series chips for their iPhones, the M-series motion chips, and now their W-series wireless chips. Given that the A-series has for the last several years been 1-1.5 years ahead of the competition and that the M-series are apparently doing things with Blue
Silego (Score:1)
Silego makes little mixed-signal ICs. Think one-time programmable mini FPGAs with just a few LUTs, ADC/DACs, clocks, and power switching components. They make excellent glue chips between more complex components, and are really tiny.
Good for Silego! They're a talented little group that I've been watching for a few years now.
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like Apple specifically wants the Silego team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Considering all of the people changing over to Apple work in Europe - unlikely.