What does Renesas' acquisition of PCB toolmaker Altium mean?

By Majeed Ahmad, EDN (February 16, 2024)

Renesas increasingly looks like Cisco of the 1990s, when the router pioneer became an acquisition force and transformed itself into a networking giant within a decade. Renesas, the semiconductor industry’s serial acquirer, has announced to snap PCB design toolmaker Altium nearly a month after announcing the purchase of gallium nitride (GaN) design house Transphorm.

Renesas has worked closely with Altium—headquartered in Las Jolla, California, and listed in Australia—for the past couple of years to standardize its PCB design and evaluation boards on the cloud-based Altium 365 platform. While implementing Altium’s uniform PCB design tool, the Japanese chipmaker aimed to streamline its reference designs and product kits in order to reduce design complexity and speed time to market.

In other words, by employing Altium’s cloud-based PCB design platform, Renesas wanted to harmonize the development workflow around its 400-plus evaluation board designs. Eventually, Renesas figured that it needed to own a design platform that’s efficient and easier to use. Moreover, owning a design software platform could become a competitive advantage in its bid to become a solutions provider instead of merely a chip vendor.

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