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Microchip Playbook


Microchip: Could This M&A Predator Become Prey?

Praying Mantis

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Microchip actively participated in the consolidation of its industry segment, but its success, rising valuation and stable business make it a target too. Can any rival dare to take it up now that it is so much bigger?

Even after the frenzied mergers and acquisition actions of the last decade, the semiconductor industry still has quite a few juicy targets but not many are as mouth wateringly appealing as Microchip Technology Inc.

The microcontroller supplier is a voracious consolidator that has gobbled up some 25 companies in the last 12 years, but it stands the risks of becoming a victim of its own success.

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Microchip Forges Strategies on MCUs, Analog, Power

Microcontroller board connects to an electronic project

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
 MCUs are fundamentally different from microprocessors – in product longevity, legacy process nodes and a host of permutations they are expected to offer. But MCU diversity comes with costs. The question is not only how long Microchip can keep up with what it’s doing, but also how it can do better.

The core of Microchip’s business is MCUs, more accurately described as “embedded control,” noted Steve Drehobl, Microchip senior vice president.

Microchip has the full gamut of microcontrollers, ranging from 8- and 16-bit with digital signal controller to 32-bit MCUs and FPGA. But its emphasis is really not so much about the core, Drehobl noted. “It’s all about the peripherals.”

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Microchip: Preserving Corporate Culture After M&A

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Microchip has kept what some might consider the lost art of employee-centric management. But how does a company preserve its culture when it keeps acquiring other companies. Microchip has answers.

The human resource management style of Microchip clashes with that of many Silicon Valley companies.

Headquartered in Chandler, Ariz., some 700 miles away from Santa Clara, Calif., Microchip has scrupulously retained, nurtured, and perfected the art of managing a congenial, cohesive, and people-centric company.

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Microchip CEO Pursues 'Bowling Pin' Strategy

Ganesh Moorthy. Microchip CEO

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Microchip claims it is no longer so easy to pigeonhole it as an 8-bit MCU company. CEO Ganesh Moorthy explains plans to leverage its bread-and-butter semiconductor products, create more permutations and product combinations, as Microchip plots to lead fragmented embedded/IoT markets.

Microchip is already in the “Things” market, CEO Ganesh Moorthy recently told The Ojo-Yoshida Report. That penetration, in his mind, puts the company in a well-timed position to seize the “megatrend” of the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

Here’s why.

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