Renesas Acquires Celeno for $315M

Article By : Nitin Dahad

Renesas completes acquisition of Israeli Wi-Fi chipset developer Celeno to enhance it connectivity portfolio.

Renesas Electronics has completed its acquisition of Israeli Wi-Fi chipset developer Celeno Communications for $315 million in cash.

Celeno, founded in 2005 by Gilad Rozen, offers a range of advanced Wi-Fi chipsets and software for Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, targeting high-performance home networks, smart buildings, enterprise and industrial markets. The company said its Wi-Fi chipsets and software have been successfully integrated into numerous OEM devices and deployed in tens of millions of homes by nearly 100 service providers. Those products are deployed in home gateways, routers, set-top boxes, Wi-Fi extenders, IoT hubs, small cells, hotspots and industrial Wi-Fi devices.

The company has also developed a Wi-Fi Doppler imaging technology and high-resolution imaging technology based on Wi-Fi, targeting home elder care and assisted living, home security, automotive applications and connected factories. The technology tracks and analyzes the motion, behavior and location of humans and objects using standard Wi-Fi, eliminating the need for multiple cameras or sensors in home and industrial settings.

Renesas said the acquisition will enhance its connectivity portfolio, complementing its own low-power MCU/MPU/SoC processors, wireless ICs, sensors and power management technologies. The combination would allow Renesas to address markets for low-power connectivity in IoT applications as well as infrastructure, industrial and automotive use cases.

The acquisition also increases Renesas’ engineering and software talent pool as well as its ability to scale designs, adding R&D staff based in Israel, Ukraine, India, China and Taiwan.

“Building on our recently-expanded connectivity portfolio following the Dialog acquisition, the addition of Celeno provides us with more advanced Wi-Fi connectivity capabilities to deliver end-to-end connectivity solutions for both clients and access points,” said Hidetoshi Shibata, president and CEO of Renesas.

Celeno will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Renesas, the company said.

This article was originally published on EE Times.

Nitin Dahad is a correspondent for EE Times, EE Times Europe and also Editor-in-Chief of embedded.com. With 35 years in the electronics industry, he’s had many different roles: from engineer to journalist, and from entrepreneur to startup mentor and government advisor. He was part of the startup team that launched 32-bit microprocessor company ARC International in the US in the late 1990s and took it public, and co-founder of The Chilli, which influenced much of the tech startup scene in the early 2000s. He’s also worked with many of the big names—including National Semiconductor, GEC Plessey Semiconductors, Dialog Semiconductor and Marconi Instruments.

 

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