Qualcomm Inc. on Wednesday announced that it has agreed to buy fellow semiconductor maker Atheros Communications Inc. for about 3.1 billion U.S. dollars.
The deal will be the largest acquisition ever for Qualcomm, which is based in San Diego in the U.S. state of California.
Qualcomm, a leader in supplying chips to mobile phones, said the purchase is intended to help accelerate the expansion of its technologies and platforms to new businesses beyond cellular.
Atheros, headquartered in California's San Jose, makes semiconductors for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets.
Analysts believed that a takeover of Atheros would help Qualcomm strengthen its offerings of Wi-Fi technology and make inroads into tablet computer and other adjacent markets.
"It is Qualcomm's strategy to continually integrate additional technologies into mobile devices to make them the primary way that people communicate, compute and access content. This acquisition is a natural extension of that strategy into other types of devices," Paul Jacobs, chairman and chief executive officer of Qualcomm, said in a statement.
Qualcomm has agreed to purchase Atheros for 45 dollars per share in cash, and the transaction has been approved by boards of directors of both companies.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2011, pending regulatory approvals and the approval of Atheros' stockholders.