Silicon Labs to sell its auto and infrastructure business to Skyworks for $2.75B in a deal that includes Silicon Labs' power and isolation chips for EVs
Silicon Laboratories Inc (SLAB.O) said on Thursday it would sell its infrastructure and automotive business to Skyworks Solutions Inc …
Context & Ripple Effects
Silicon Labs spent years assembling a broader portfolio — most visibly its $282M purchase of Sigma Designs to push into connected home — but this $2.75B sale of the infrastructure and automotive unit, EV power and isolation chips included, reverses that direction and leaves it concentrated on its core wireless/IoT franchise.
For Skyworks, this extends a playbook it ran in 2015 when it bought networking chip maker PMC-Sierra for $2B: adding infrastructure silicon on top of a wireless-chip base. The divestiture also reshaped what was left of Silicon Labs — a slimmer, IoT-focused company that five years later agreed to be acquired outright by Texas Instruments for ~$7.5B at $231/share.
First-order effects
- Skyworks immediately gains EV power and isolation chip lines, deepening its infrastructure exposure beyond the networking assets it picked up via PMC-Sierra.
- Silicon Labs exits automotive and infrastructure silicon entirely, becoming a focused wireless/IoT chip supplier overnight.
Second-order effects
- A pure-play Silicon Labs becomes a cleaner takeover candidate — the outcome the corpus confirms when Texas Instruments agreed to acquire the whole company for ~$7.5B in early 2026.
- Automotive semiconductor buyers lose one independent supplier of EV power/isolation parts as those products fold into Skyworks' catalog, tightening the field around the remaining analog and power vendors.
Third-order effects
- The deal fits a recurring industry pattern of large chipmakers absorbing specialist portfolios while sellers prune to defensible niches — the same shape as Synopsys' $2.1B sale of its Software Integrity Group and Semtech's $1.2B acquisition of Sierra Wireless — with each pruning round concentrating product categories under fewer owners.
- If pruning-to-focus keeps preceding acquisitions, mid-cap mixed-signal vendors will increasingly face a choice: stay diversified and absorb pressure across fronts, or narrow deliberately and risk being absorbed themselves.
The trend: Semiconductor consolidation is proceeding by portfolio surgery — incumbents buying category-specific assets while sellers slim down into focused niches that often become the next acquisition targets.