Western Digital has completed a USD $65 million cash acquisition of leading solid-state drives supplier, SiliconSystems.
SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors.
Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.
These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008.
John Coyne, president and CEO of WD, said its worldwide infrastructure and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships.
He said SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.
"The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established USD $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives," he said.
"SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."
Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.
