SiTime Corporation is acquiring a number of time-related products from a semiconductor company
The company this week announced it has entered into an exclusive agreement with Aura Semiconductor to acquire its clock products and license all of its clock IP.
SiTime will hold exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable rights to sell existing and new products based on Aura’s IP and clocking portfolio.
The $148 million deal is set to close by the end of the year; $36 million of the fixed payments will be paid at close, $75 million in 2024, and $37 million in 2025. All payments are tied to product deliveries from Aura.
“SiTime’s vision is to transform all categories of the $10 billion timing market,” said Rajesh Vashist, CEO and chairman of SiTime. “Since our IPO in 2019, our singular focus has been on solving the most difficult problems in the oscillator category, and that has paid off. In these four years, we’ve grown from 60 to 150 unique products, and the price of our highest-value oscillator has grown tenfold. With this acquisition, we bring our focus to the category of clocks, adding 20 best-in-class clocks now, and another 20 by the end of 2024.”
He continued: “Before today, customers were forced to deal with separate Clock and Oscillator vendors. Uniquely, SiTime will offer both categories, standalone and engineered to be optimized with each other, for our core markets of communications, data center, and AI.”
In the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call this week, Vashist said the acquired Aura portfolio includes all four major categories of clocks — Network Synchronizers, Jitter Cleaners, Clock Generators, and Buffers.
“With this acquisition, SiTime immediately adds 20 best-in-class clocks now and another 20 by the end of 2024,” he said. “Additionally, by combining our MEMS and oscillators with these clocks, we believe that a whole new category of precision timing products will be created for our core markets of comms, data center, and AI.”
He specifically noted the acquisition will help target remote radio units and core routers for wireless communications as well as core and Edge data centers.
SiTime offers oscillator, clock, and resonator products to help devices – including those inside data centers and wireless networks – keep time. The company’s main offerings are silicon MEMS-based programmable precision timing chip components.
Founded in India in 2001, Aurasemi is a fabless semiconductor company that designs and supplies Mixed Signal Integrated Circuits solutions.
The two companies had previously worked together on SiTime’s Cascade product line, which launched in 2020.
During the earnings call, SiTime CFO, Arthur D. Chadwick, said: “Aura will continue as a company, absolutely. For the next few years, the products that they will continue to develop are part of this deal, and we will have complete ownership of the technology associated with those products. We will absorb them into our technology and we take complete control of management of those products going forward.”
Barclays acted as the exclusive financial advisor to SiTime.
