Here’s another installment in our series of news articles reporting on a recent gulf of takeovers at megalomaniac sums that occur in the electronics industry. Just in in case you came crawling from under a rock, so far we’ve had:
In response to the takeover frenzy in our neck of the woods called electronics, Clemens Valens and I have dreamed up an “Acme Corporation” which will eventually become the One Source Of All Electronics on the globe and possibly in space too. It’s all imaginary of course, and a running gag with Roadrunner’s Coyote Wile E. and the Big Fish Eat Little Fish pictures as our fixed graphic elements. Because of the name Acme we cannot be sued or bought.

And now it’s “Follow the Leader” :-) Fairchild taken over by mastodon ON Semiconductor. Since November 2015 the merger was under scrutiny of the U.S. FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and ON was only recently cleared to go ahead provided it sells off its ignition IGBT business to… Littelfuse!

Ignition IGBTs function as solid-state switches in the ignition systems of automotive internal combustion engines. Without a divestiture on part on ON, the FTC ruled, “it is likely that the proposed merger would substantially lessen competition in the worldwide market for Ignition IGBTs, resulting in higher prices and reduced innovation”. So we rest assured there will be cheap sparks in our engines for some time to come.