The Week In Review: IoT

Deals
Rambus completed its $32 million acquisition of the Snowbush IP assets from Semtech. Through the end of 2022, Rambus may make additional payments on the transaction, depending upon new product sales. The Snowbush IP assets became part of the Memory and Interfaces Division at Rambus, complementing the company’s offerings in IP and serializer/deserializer blocks.

Samsung Electronics America has agreed to acquire Dacor, a manufacturer of luxury kitchen appliances, established in 1965; financial terms weren’t revealed. Dacor President and CEO Chuck Huebner said in a statement, “We expect that, with Samsung’s global scale, financial strength, and market leadership, we will be able to accelerate our growth as we better meet the needs of both our high-end consumers and our retail partners.” Dacor makes cooktops, ranges, refrigerators, wall oven, and other high-end appliances. While Samsung says it will retain Dacor’s brand and product lines, there are expectations that it will bring Internet of Things technology to Dacor appliances.

AT&T struck a deal to provide connectivity for wearable devices from Biotricity, which plans to field an Internet of Things-enabled wearable device by the end of 2016. Biotricity CEO Waqaas Al-Siddiq said in a statement, “As we prepare to commercialize our first medical solution, we understand the importance of integrating IoT into next-generation devices within the regulatory environment, as we believe there will be a true market advantage.” Steve Burger, area vice president of business development and connected health at AT&T IoT Solutions, added, “IoT will support a new generation of medical devices capable of transmitting data on an ongoing basis that help push care outside of the hospital and allow for continuous care virtually wherever the patient goes.”

Finance
What two stocks are the best long-term plays for the Internet of Things? Leo Sun of The Motley Fool proposes Cisco Systems and Sierra Wireless. Cisco is diversifying beyond its routers and switches into collaboration, cybersecurity, and video services, he notes. The networking giant acquired Jasper Technologies earlier this year and used it to form its IoT Cloud Business Unit. Sierra Wireless makes and sells 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE embedded modules and gateways. “I personally prefer Cisco over Sierra as a long-term play on the IoT market, but Sierra could rebound as billions of additional objects come online,” Sun writes.

Products
Microchip Technology has an end-to-end security offering for Internet of Things devices that connect to Amazon Web Services. The chip company collaborated with AWS to help IoT devices comply with the public cloud computing service’s mutual authentication IoT security model. Microchip is providing the AT88CKECC kit and the AWS-ECC508 device. “We understand the often complex nature of implementing AWS mutual authentication in microcontrollers,” Nuri Dagdeviren, vice president and general manager of secure products at Atmel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microchip, said in a statement. He added, “The customer would need to have some understanding of how to secure a software implementation, and this often creates a huge barrier. We have had a longstanding relationship with AWS and are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the world’s largest cloud provider to build a solution that helps our customers easily and securely connect to the AWS Cloud.”