ST buys AMS NFC, RFID business

Article By : Vivek Nanda

STMicroelectronics has bought itself AMS's NFC and RFID related IP, technologies, products and business that it said are "highly complementary" to its microcontroller products.

The wave of consolidation in the electronics continues unabated. The latest announcement, just in, is from STMicroelectronics. The company is acquiring the NFC and RFID reader business from AMS AG.

ST bought itself IP, technologies, products and business that it said are "highly complementary" to its microcontroller products. What's more they got about 50 technologists transferred over from AMS.

“This acquisition builds on our deep expertise in secure microcontrollers and gives ST all of the building blocks to create the next generation of highly-integrated secure NFC solutions for mobile and for a broad range of Internet of Things devices,” a press release quoted Claude Dardanne, Executive Vice President and General Manager of STMicroelectronics’ Microcontroller and Digital ICs Group.

Update: AMS sees the transaction as an effort to focus on its sensor solutions. The company will retain its NFC/RFID wireless tags business and related IP and plans to create wireless sensor solutions for IoT applications combining NFC and RFID connectivity interfaces with its portfolio of sensors.

The design and marketing resources that STMicroelectronics is getting are mostly based in Premstaetten, Austria, and Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Earlier this year (February 2016), the companies announced a jointly developed NFC solution comprising the ST54E, an SiP with an NFC controller and a Secure Element compliant with the Global Platform standard v2.2, and AMS’s AS39230 NFC analog front end with "boostedNFC" technology. And this got designed into ARM's mbed wearable reference design.

For the AMS assets, ST paid $77.8 million cash and deferred earn-out contingent on future results. ST estimates these will be about $13 million and will not exceed $37 million.

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