Japan's Renesas to buy US chipmaker IDT for $6.7 billion

Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy US peer Integrated Device Technology Inc for about $6.7 billion, aiming to boost its expertise in self-driving car technologies.

The deal allows Renesas, second only to NXP Semiconductors NV in chips used in cars, to bring on board IDT's know-how in chips for wireless networks and data storage which are crucial for self-driving cars.

Renesas will pay $49.00 per share in cash for all IDT outstanding shares, compared with Monday's close at $42.08, and expects the deal to close in the first half of 2019.

It will finance the acquisition with 679 billion yen ($6.1 billion) of bank loans and cash, it said in a statement.

Renesas was created in 2010 from a merger of NEC Corp's chip division and Renesas Technology, which itself was established through a merger of the chip units of Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

It was late to join a wave of consolidation in the chip industry as it struggled to recover from damage suffered at key plants in an earthquake that hit Japan in 2011.

Last year it bought US chipmaker Intersil Corp for $3.2 billion to expand its portfolio in analog chips, which process signals such as sound, light and temperature before converting them into digital signals.