Irvine-based chipmaker Microsemi Corp. is paying $245 million to buy Israel’s PowerDsine Ltd., a maker of chips to send electricity over computer networks.
Microsemi is paying stock and cash for PowerDsine, which has 136 workers, most of them engineers in Israel, San Jose and Melville, N.Y.
PowerDsine shareholders are set to get $8.25 per share in cash, plus about one-fifteenth of a Microsemi share for each PowerDsine share they own.
The offer is worth about 18.5% more than what PowerDsine was trading at before the announcement.
Microsemi said it expects the buy, set to close in the first quarter, to “slightly” dilute earnings per share for a year and then add to earnings after that.
PowerDsine’s chips are designed to send power over computer networking cables, cutting the need for separate energy supplies for routers, switches and other devices. The chips are seen as a way to cut costs of installing a network.
The company competes with Milpitas-based Linear Technology Corp. with Cisco Systems Inc. as the biggest customer for the companies’ chips. Cisco now uses Linear chips.
PowerDsine has managed to sell to Irvine-based Linksys, a Cisco unit that makes networking gear for consumers.
The company said last week it lost $560,000 in the third quarter, largely due to the costs of accounting for stock compensation. A year earlier, PowerDsine made $898,000.
Excluding stock costs, third-quarter income was $555,000.
Sales for quarter were $9.6 million, down 12% from a year earlier.
,Michael Lyster
