Skyworks Solutions has announced that for $76.5 million, they have acquired the remaining 34 percent interest in the filter joint venture they created with Panasonic in 2014. At the core of the joint venture was Panasonic’s engineering and process talent, expertise in filter design and leading edge products, as well as 412 fundamental filter patents and patent applications for surface acoustic wave (SAW) and temperature compensated (TC) SAW devices.
In August 2015, Skyworks expanded their production capacity with the addition of a 405,000 square foot facility in Osaka to help meet the growing demand for highly integrated solutions leveraging filter technology. To date, total production has exceeded more than two billion filters. The acquisition is not expected to impact Skyworks’ consolidated financial statements as operations have been consolidated with their financial statements since the date of the initial joint venture.
“With this acquisition, Skyworks has strengthened its leadership position as one of the world’s largest providers of high performance, integrated-filter solutions. Given the proliferation of frequency bands, the addition of LTE capabilities and market demand for always-on connectivity, the need for filters has never been higher. This strategic investment uniquely enables them to deliver end-to-end solutions for some of the fastest growing and most demanding applications in the world requiring high performance filter technology. Together with external partners, they are successfully addressing the low, mid and high band performance requirements across premium smartphones and IoT applications.
According to a recent Research and Markets report, the global radio frequency filter market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15 percent during the period 2016-2020 and the rise in the number of frequency bands, modulation schemes and power amplifier modes to support increased mobile data traffic is resulting in high RF front-end complexity.
