Things you don’t know about Qorvo’s acquisition of Active-Semi!

alan000345

Things you don’t know about Qorvo’s acquisition of Active-Semi! [Copy link]

Why did Qorvo acquire Active-Semi?

This can first be seen from the development prospects of the market that Active-Semi focuses on. As shown in the figure below, power management will contribute more and more revenue to the IDP market (including 5G base stations, defense active phased arrays, automobiles and the Internet of Things) that Qorvo focuses on.

This is one of the reasons why Active-Semi attracted Qorvo's interest.

△ Charles Wong, VP of Sales, Asia Pacific, Qorvo

Charles Wong, VP of sales for Qorvo Asia Pacific, said that Active-Semi is an expert in power management, and its key word is ubiquitous.

Qorvo is an RF expert, and we are everywhere. If we can effectively combine power management, PAC and RF, and use power to give RF life, we can provide the industry with more efficient and higher-quality solutions. This is what Qorvo calls "bringing the wings for intelligent motor control."

"On the other hand, Qorvo is a relatively large company that covers most of the world's major customers. It also has its own packaging plant, which is not available in Active-Semi, which focuses on power. This is one of the reasons why Qorvo + Active-Semi will produce 1 + 1 > 2," Charles Wong continued.

He further pointed out that in the era of 5G and the Internet of Things, this ubiquity will become the norm. Therefore, if we can better combine Qorvo's RF products with Active-Semi's power products, and use Qorvo's sales channels to push solutions that integrate the advantages of both to major customers, this will be beneficial to both Qorvo and customers.

Steven Zhang added: “But the integration we are talking about is not board-level integration, but chip-level integration.”

Steven Zhang further pointed out that there are already many board-level integration solutions. With the improvement of integration, it is an inevitable trend to integrate functions such as connection (such as Bluetooth, GPS and WIFI) and control into a single chip. This is because it will make the entire design more compact, simple and highly optimized, meet the chip requirements of future miniaturized devices, and reduce chips and costs at the same time.

Of course, in promoting such chip-level integration, there will inevitably be a series of challenges including EMI, but this is exactly the problem that Active-Semi has been focusing on solving in the past and has achieved good results. "With the help of Qorvo's factory, we can further control costs," said Steven Zhang.

Active-Semi will continue to start from markets such as 5G base station power supplies and cooperate more with Qorvo's leading RF products in this field to provide customers with more cost-effective solutions, and all of this is worth looking forward to.

Recently, based on Active-Semi's technology, Qorvo launched the new PAC5527 power application controller. In this SoC, a high-performance 150MHz Arm Cortex-M4F based on FLASH, 128kB FLASH, power management module, programmable current high-end and low-end gate driver and signal conditioning module are integrated.

Compared to competing solutions, this combination can significantly save PCB space and reduce BOM by up to 30%. And with its high-performance MCU, designers can add other value-added features such as safety standards, diagnostics and self-test functions to enhance the reliability of the entire system.

Consumers will also benefit from electronic devices that are lighter, more compact, more reliable and have longer battery life.

In addition to the first time, Active-Semi also has automotive-grade power chips, whose high reliability and high performance allow it to successfully enter the original equipment market.

For more information, please see " Why is 1+1 greater than 2? Things you don’t know about Qorvo’s acquisition of Active-Semi !".