Atmel to be acquired by UK’s Dialog Semiconductor in $4.6 billion deal – San Jose Mercury News.

A British semiconductor company that supplies chips to Apple said … it is acquiring Silicon Valley’s Atmel in a $4.6 billion deal that strengthens both companies to compete for business in the coming Internet of Things. The acquisition has a smaller Dialog Semiconductor, based in the United Kingdom with 1,500 worldwide employees, buying Atmel, based in San Jose with 5,200 global employees, for more than Dialog’s market value. Dialog is issuing new shares and borrowing to finance the purchase.

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Ok look, this happened back in September and we didn’t have this newsletter going in full swing, but here we are! ATMEL makes the chip(s) all of us who do Arduino and Arduino-like stuff mostly – So we’re of course interested in where this is all going (We just released the Feather M0 ATSAMD21G18 ARM Cortex M0 processor, clocked at 48 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the new Arduino Zero is from ATMEL).

What’s missing? The hardware is mostly here at least for us in the Maker market, the software and services to spin up a lot of IoT products and services isn’t distributed or known or used, at least not easily. particle.io, our adafruit.io (beta) are good starts. It took a few years for things like AWS to all of a sudden just be baked in to modern web services and then it was just everywhere. We thought it would be electric imp, but they’ve been really quiet lately, maybe it’s more “Industrial Internet of Things”. Any way, rambling here – IoT services for hardware, we need more and easier to get going, more so for “makers” to get more start ups going, funding has happened with Kickstarter, now the IoT services need to be around as easy as it is to get money. Unclear if it will be from who makes the hardware, still thinking about that.

And why are we brining up this old story? Well, it’s not exactly over or old “Exclusive: Microchip is undisclosed Atmel bidder challenging Dialog” – it ain’t over! Atmel said on Dec. 11 it had started negotiations with an unidentified party that made a $9 per share cash offer that could potentially be deemed more valuable than a cash-and-stock acquisition proposal by Dialog Semiconductor Plc it accepted in September.