Industry 4.0 is one of the ten future projects proposed by the German government's high-tech Strategy 2020. To put it simply, it is "Internet plus manufacturing". The United States is called "industrial Internet". China calls it "made in China 2025", and the essence of these three elements is consistent, pointing to a core, namely intelligent manufacturing.

In the face of today's fire industry 4.0, major industrial semiconductor manufacturers are also frequent. According to the previous Market Research Institute IHS, the sales volume of industrial semiconductor in 2015 reached 41.9 billion US dollars, up about 1% compared with 2014, which was better than the performance of 2% of the global semiconductor market decline in the same period. However, from the ranking of industrial semiconductor manufacturers in 2015, some changes have taken place in individual manufacturers. Ti has been the leading position with more than 3.5 billion US dollars of revenue. The rest two to ten companies have shown a growth trend except for the decline of St revenue. It is worth mentioning that NXP, after buying Freescale, ranked industrial semiconductor revenue from 16th to seventh.

Today semiconductor acquisition is becoming more and more intense. What will happen to the ranking today? Small edition starts with the first ten industrial semiconductor companies' acquisition this year, and it looks at the "buy buy" actions that giants have done for development and ranking.

Acquisition action

(1) Infineon

In July, Infineon bought wolfspeed power and RF business of Cree, the most profitable business unit of Corey, focusing on semiconductor energy control business, for $850million in cash.

Wolfspeed is one of the main suppliers of silicon carbide power devices and silicon carbide based gallium nitride RF power solutions. The core competitiveness of the system includes silicon carbide wafer substrate manufacturing, RF power devices and silicon carbide wafer substrate manufacturing including single crystal GaN layer. These core competencies, coupled with more than 500 skilled employees, and a strong intellectual property portfolio that includes about 2000 patents that have been granted or are being applied, can complement the technology and resources acquired by Infineon's acquisition of International Rectifier in early 2015. Wolfspeed's silicon carbide based portfolio is an ideal complement to the Infineon portfolio. "After the acquisition of wolfspeed, we will be the world's top supplier of silicon carbide power devices," said Dr reinhardploss, CEO of Infineon technology.

Not only did wolfspeed buy, Infineon announced in October that it had acquired innoluce, a Dutch semiconductor company. To supplement its leading advantage in the booming auto driving technology sensor market. "The acquisition of innoluce is an important step in lidar technology," said peterscheffer, who is in charge of Infineon automotive electronics. Reduce the cost of lidar to a level acceptable to every new vehicle in the world. " In addition to cars, innoluce's equipment serves the industrial and medical markets. This has helped Infineon compete in emerging markets in the future.

(2) Intel

In January, Intel acquired ascendingtechnologies, a German commercial UAV hardware company; In March, it acquired replayechnologies, which is widely used in American sports broadcasting; May, it acquired itseez, a Russian company developed by computer vision technology; In August, it announced that it would buy nervanasystems, an artificial intelligence start-up; Announced plans to acquire movidius in September; Foreign media reported on November 2 that Intel acquired mavinci, a German commercial UAV software startup. According to the above incomplete statistics of Intel merger and acquisition case, Intel is stepping out of traditional chip products and seeking more business opportunities in many areas that have suddenly increased.

Although many giants are also buying AI companies, their purpose is different, mostly to enhance the existing business of ontology. Intel hopes to analyze a large amount of data Intel has through its in-depth learning capabilities. To this end, Intel has acquired almost all processor architectures to build its own AI acceleration processor, and also prepared all possible processor architectures to fight this AI chip war. In the first 30-year series merger and acquisition of Intel in the field of stable chip, it is not difficult to see that artificial intelligence, deep learning and video technology are changing the IT industry, and it is becoming increasingly prominent among them.