LSI buying out rival Agere in $4B deal

LSI Logic announced plans Monday to buy fellow chipmaker Agere Systems in a deal valued at $4 billion.

LSI will use Agere’s network, storage and mobile processors to bolster its own storage, network and consumer electronics components.

LSI makes Fibre Channel, Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA storage arrays and controllers, which it sells through OEM agreements with HP, IBM and Sun. The purchase is the second for LSI this year. Last month, the company acquired StoreAge, a storage virtualization vendor, for $50 million to boost its software management capabilities.

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LSI Logic announced plans Monday to buy fellow chipmaker Agere Systems in a deal valued at $4 billion.

LSI will use Agere’s network, storage and mobile processors to bolster its own storage, network and consumer electronics components.

LSI makes Fibre Channel, Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA storage arrays and controllers, which it sells through OEM agreements with HP, IBM and Sun. The purchase is the second for LSI this year. Last month, the company acquired StoreAge, a storage virtualization vendor, for $50 million to boost its software management capabilities.

In the consumer market, LSI makes application processors for multimedia such products as digital media players.

Agere, headquartered in Allentown, Pa., was founded in 2000 and acquired by Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) in 2000. The company spun off in 2002. It is known best for its mobile and network processors, which are used in SMC’s Gigabit Ethernet switch and NEC’s routers.

With Agere in its pocket, LSI, in Milpitas, Calif., expects to roughly double its revenue to $3.5 billion and have 9,100 employees. Abhi Talwalkar, LSI president and CEO, will keep his titles.

The companies expect the transaction to close in the first calendar quarter of 2007.

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