NXP buys Sharp's BlueStreak MCU line

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 7/9/2007

NXP Semiconductors has acquired the BlueStreak microcontroller product portfolio from Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas as it drives to become the largest vendor of ARM MCU products.

Financial terms of the sale, which closed July 3, have not been disclosed.

The move announced this morning comes about 10 months after NXP was officially spun off from Philips in September 2006. Following that, Sharp halted development on its BlueStreak line in October 2006, citing "strategic reasons." NXP would not confirm or deny that the companies had started talks of a possible acquisition by that time.

With the deal, NXP now has the ability to manufacture and sell the complete line of ARM7 and ARM9 processor-based BlueStreak microcontrollers, previously offered by Sharp. The acquisition expands NXP's ARM Powered microcontroller portfolio to 50 products, which the company claims is the world's largest portfolio of ARM7 and ARM9 processor-based microcontroller products. The portfolio will include 11 ARM processor-based MCUs featuring LCD controllers to support graphical displays, including the NXP LPC2478 and LPC2470 announced earlier this year.

The BlueStreak buy marks the second acquisition announced by NXP this year. In February, the company bought Silicon Laboratories Inc.'s Aero transceiver, AeroFONE single-chip phone and power amplifier product lines for $285 million in cash.

NXP said it has plans to grow even more in the coming months. "We expect to be the largest vendor of ARM MCU products," Pierre-Yves Lesaicherre, senior VP and general manager of NXP's standards ICs segment, told Electronic News. "We are still intent to grow through acquisition."