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Microsemi makes specialized computer chips and electronic parts for airplanes, satellites, weapons, and data centers, where failure is not an option.
Microsemi is a chip company that sells the kind of electronics that absolutely cannot fail. Its parts go into fighter jets, satellites, missile systems, hospital equipment, and the power systems inside big data centers. When a regular consumer gadget chip dies, you buy a new phone. When a chip in a satellite or a pacemaker dies, people can die or hundreds of millions of dollars can vanish. That fear is the business.
The company's biggest and most profitable market is aerospace and defense, where it sells chips that must survive radiation in space, extreme heat, and decades of use without repair. Its second big leg is power management: chips and components that convert and control electricity inside data centers, industrial machines, and communications gear. It also sells timing devices — the tiny clocks that keep electronics synchronized — and field-programmable chips that customers can program for specialized jobs. Customers are mostly other manufacturers and government contractors who design Microsemi parts into their products years in advance, which makes them very sticky: swapping a chip means re-certifying an entire system, so buyers usually don't.
For years Microsemi grew by buying smaller chipmakers and squeezing out costs, becoming a roll-up of niche, high-margin, low-volume chip businesses that big players like Texas Instruments or Analog Devices didn't bother with. That strategy worked, but it also made the company a collection of parts rather than one integrated machine, and by 2017 activist investors were pushing for change. In early 2018, chipmaker Microchip Technology agreed to buy Microsemi for about $8.35 billion, and the deal closed that May. So Microsemi no longer trades as its own stock. It lives on as a Microchip brand, and its defense and space chips are a meaningful reason Microchip paid up.
Saved answer · last researched 7 Nov 2026