Micron Technology Inc is to take over Renditon Inc, the graphics accelerator company, in an agreed $88m deal. Only four days after agreeing to buy Texas Instruments Inc’s memory chip business for $800m (CI No 3435), Micron has snapped up Rendition in a bid to diversify its product portfolio. Steve Appleton, Micron’s chairman, president and CEO said: We are very excited about the new opportunities in graphics accelerators and digital appliances that this partnership makes possible. He said that graphics accelerators represented an ideal application that takes advantage of Micron’s embedded DRAM technology. The two companies have had a close relationship for some time and in May announced a plan to develop Socket X technology, an open architecture that defines the interface between single chip graphics accelerators and PC system boards. They were also working on single chip graphics accelerators that use embedded DRAM technology. While Micron has been hard hit by falling DRAM prices – a problem exacerbated by the crisis in Asian countries from which its rivals operate, the deal with TI has eased the company’s immediate cash shortage because it is injecting $750m of cash reserves in the form of loans to ease Micron’s liquidity problems (CI No 3,436).
