> I'm still reeling at how very much chip consolidation the world's gone through. All of it should get stomped flat, but since we don't actually believe in ant

> I'm still reeling at how very much chip consolidation the world's gone through. All of it should get stomped flat, but since we don't actually believe in anti-trust enforcement in the US anymore ... Rather than thinking about these transactions as buying chips or engineering, you need think of them as buying customers. It's simply cheaper and more reliable to buy the company who has an existing customer rather than pry them away through competition. The question here is "Who does SiLabs have as a customer that TI was willing to cough up for?" I was going to say cough up a premium, but that doesn't really seem to be the case. SiLabs has annual revenue of about $700 million, so $8 billion is just above the 10-year valuation that is pretty standard for valuing a business.