Maxtor Corp of San Jose, California has signed to acquire US Design Inc, a Lanham, Maryland integrator of cache-based storage systems and controllers, for shares worth approximately $16.3m. Under the agreement, US Design shareholders will receive 922,666 shares of Maxtor common, and the company will operate as a subsidiary of Maxtor. The deal will give Maxtor an internal source for disk controllers, possibly alleviating a problem that has held up deliveries of an important new drive, delayed because of incompatibilities in bought-in controller chips. For the past few years, US Design has integrated Maxtor’s high-capacity 5.25 Winchesters into its subsystems, which are aimed primarily at DEC users. US Design went public in 1981 with an initial offering that brought in $3.5m; it employs 67 people and made a loss of $1.5m on turnover of $8m in the year to June. The deal should be completed by the second quarter of this year.
