ST-Ericsson a takeover target for AMD, Intel or NVIDIA?

Semiconductor giant ST-Ericsson, a joint venture between mobile specialist Ericsson and STMicroelectronics, is ripe for a takeover - and fingers are pointing at AMD, Intel and Nvidia as the most likely candidates.

ST-Ericsson was formed as a joint venture between the two companies back in 2009, and while fabless its communications chipsets have found their way into a huge number of devices throughout the world.

Recently, however, the company has been shifting its target market: while it still makes the majority of its profits from communications hardware, ST-Ericsson has been using an ARM licence to produce a system-on-chip design known as NovaThor. Combining communications hardware, high-performance Mali 400 graphics processing, and single- or dual-core Cortex-A9 central processing units, NovaThor is proving popular with handset makers as an alternative to similar highly-integrated chips from the likes of Qualcomm.