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Apple has been heavily beefing up efforts to build faster and more powerful chips meant to stand out from the competition, as evidenced by its custom-designed A12 Bionic SoC built for the latest iPhones. The tech giant is now taking a further step in its chip development push by striking a $600 million deal with UK-based chipmaker Dialog Semiconductor.
As part of the agreement, Apple will license Dialog"s power management integrated circuits, acquire certain assets of the company, and purchase its products set for delivery over the next three years. Additionally, Apple will absorb more than 300 Dialog employees to bolster its chip research and development team and take over Dialog"s facilities in Livorno, Italy; Swindon, U.K.; and Nabern and Neuaubing, Germany.
In regard to the deal, Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, said:
Dialog has deep expertise in chip development, and we are thrilled to have this talented group of engineers who’ve long supported our products now working directly for Apple. Our relationship with Dialog goes all the way back to the early iPhones, and we look forward to continuing this long-standing relationship with them.
For Dialog, the agreement opens a whole lot of opportunities to produce power management, audio subsystem, and charging technologies for Apple through a range of new contracts. The deal, pending certain regulatory clearance and other closing conditions, is expected to wrap in the first half of 2019.