Analog Devices has tendered an offer to acquire Hittite Microwave for about $2 billion to round out its extensive portfolio with microwave and millimeter wave solutions.

Just in a nutshell, as to what this means to designers, look at the following Figure 1, which says it all.

Figure 1: An ADI/Hittite combination of products and capabilities would span a huge section of our electronics industry

I have always been impressed with Analog Devices’ high speed Data converter portfolio and their RF offering such as quadrature modulators and high speed amplifiers. Hittite’s strength in RF, microwave, and millimeter wave technology was always evident to me since a great part of my career was as a designer with General Microwave Corp. and also extensive relationships with Lucent and Alcatel/Lucent, especially in the Base Station Infrastructure area.

Hitite obviously complements ADI’s RF and signal conversion expertise. Now, Analog Devices, with this strategic extension into the microwave and millimeter wave realm, will accelerate the course of innovation throughout cellular and microwave communications infrastructure, automotive, industrial instrumentation, aerospace and defense vertical markets.

I spoke to ADI’s CEO, Vincent Roche, and we discussed the possibilities and what this would mean to the industry. Roche says that this deal needs to go through all the normal channels that any new acquisition must face, but it does not look like there are any major problems and that by the end of July 2014 the deal should be complete.

Roche felt that with ADI’s DSP and software capabilities and Hittite’s microwave and millimeter wave expertise, the final complete design would benefit with better integrated and synergistic solutions throughout the signal chain.

Hitite is a fabless company, but Roche said that some fabs at Analog Devices may benefit Hitite’s future products as well as combined integrated product solutions.

Partnerships

One recent example of important partnerships was Hittite and Xilinx demonstrating a complete Radio solution at MTT-S in Tampa this year. Together they demonstrated a complete 60 GHz Small Cell Backhaul solution. Analog Devices high speed Data Converter and Amplifier solution strongly complements this type of a solution, of which we will be seeing much, much more in the future.

Analog Devices’ partnership with MathWorks and Xilinx rounds out a full capability solution “machine”.

Stay tuned for more exciting solutions to come from this union and please let us know your thoughts and insights.

More articles about this topic

Xilinx and Analog Devices Achieve JEDEC JESD204B Interoperability