SiTime acquires clock products from Aura Semiconductor

3rd November 2023

Paige West

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SiTime Corporation has entered into an exclusive agreement with Aura Semiconductor to acquire its clock products and license all of its clock IP.

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

“SiTime’s vision is to transform all categories of the $10 billion timing market,” said Rajesh Vashist, CEO, and chairman of SiTime. “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.”

“We’ve leveraged our strong balance sheet to accelerate by several years our clocking revenue, while also increasing our oscillator revenue,” continued Vashist. “These clocks have gross margins that are higher than our corporate target and are used with our Elite TCXO and Epoch OCXO families. Before today, customers were forced to deal with separate Clock and Oscillator vendors. Uniquely, SiTime will offer both categories, standalone and engineered to be optimised with each other, for our core markets of communications, datacentre, and AI. With this deal, we significantly advance our vision, becoming the only provider with complete and differentiated precision timing products.”

SiTime will hold exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable rights to sell existing and new products based on Aura’s IP and clocking portfolio. $36 million of the fixed payments will be paid at close, $75 million in 2024 and $37 million in 2025. All these 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 2028. As part of the transaction, SiTime is opening an office in Bengaluru, India with an engineering and support team there.

Barclays acted as the exclusive financial advisor to SiTime.