SiTime to buy Aura timing product lines for up to US$268 million

Business news | November 2, 2023

By Peter Clarke

MEMS-based timing component vendor SiTime Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has agreed to pay $148 million for ‘clock’ product lines from Aura Semiconductor Co. Ltd. (Bengaluru, India) and license its clock-related intellectual property.

Aura Semiconductor is a fabless mixed-signal IC company founded in 2011 headquartered in India with offices in Shenzhen and Shanghai China and in the US and the UK. In 2016 the company closed a round of funding with Walden Riverwood Venture Capital.

The all-cash transaction comprises fixed payments totalling $148 million, and earnouts capped at $120 million. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2023.

Rajesh Vashist, CEO and chairman of SiTime, said: “Since our IPO in 2019, our singular focus has been on solving the most difficult problems in the oscillator category, and that has paid off. In these four years, we’ve grown from 60 to 150 unique products, and the price of our highest-value oscillator has grown tenfold. With this acquisition, we bring our focus to the category of clocks, adding 20 best-in-class clocks now, and another 20 by the end of 2024.”

“Before today, customers were forced to deal with separate clock and oscillator vendors. Uniquely, SiTime will offer both categories, stand-alone and engineered to be optimized with each other, for our core markets of communications, datacenter, and AI.”

SiTime said $36 million of the fixed payments will be paid at close, $75 million in 2024 and $37 million in 2025. All the payments are tied to product deliveries from Aura. The earnout payments will be based on various multiples of revenue generated from the acquired products, during the period from 2023 through to 2028. As part of the transaction, SiTime is opening an office in Bengaluru, India with an engineering and support team there.

At the same time SiTime announced its acquisition deal it reported financial results for the 3Q23. The company made a net loss of US$18.12 million on revenue of US$35.57. Sales were up 28.1 percent from the $27.73 million in 2Q23.