What do you buy for 3.2 billion dollars these days? If you are into flying, that kind of money gets you about seven Airbus A380-800 aircrafts (according to the 2016 price list), or, if your name is Harrison Ford, all the remaining Ryan PT-22 airplanes in the world, but if you are an electronics enthusiast there are other options.

The Japanese microcontroller and system-on-chip manufacturer Renesas for instance decided to spend this amount on the American semiconductor company Intersil. The acquisition was announced in September 2016, but could only be completed in the last week of February 2017 after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) gave its approval.

Renesas started out in 2003 as a joint venture of Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric to which, in 2010, NEC Electronics was added, and today Intersil. Elektor readers know Renesas from the popular R8C (remember the R8C/13?), M16C and R32C projects and the RL78 contest that we run a few years ago. Intersil, a 1999 spin-off of Harris Semiconductor, is especially known for its ICM8038 waveform generator, today obsolete.