Strategic business moves captured most of the headlines last week:

Companies

Avago will acquire Broadcom for $37 billion. The new company will be called Broadcom Limited, and Hock Tan will remain CEO. The Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting profile of Tan, Avago's frugal, driven and humorous CEO who's gutsy enough to make such a bet.

Almost lost in the Broadcom story, Avago reported their fiscal Q2 results. Wireless revenue was $576 million, seasonally down 13 percent from the prior quarter, yet up 66 percent from the prior year's quarter.

NXP will sell their High Performance RF power business to Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd., a Chinese state-owned investment firm, for $1.8 billion. Analysts estimate that is 3.6 to 4 times the unit's annual sales of $450 to 500 million.

Charter announced a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable for $55 billion. This follows their deal to acquire Bright House Networks, which was announced on March 31.

Anokiwave closed a series B funding round, which will allow them to expand engineering capabilities and accelerate new mmWave products. Funding was led by J.P. Carney, CEO and co-founder of Revolabs; Lamberto Raffaelli; and COM DEV International Ltd.

At the Cowen Technology, Media, & Telecom conference, Robert McMullen, MACOM's CFO, hinted at their high volume GaN on Si partners and the structure of the relationship. Listen to his remarks:

Keysight's fiscal Q2 revenue was $740 million, with operating margin of 17 percent. Both were flat with the year-ago quarter. The company said they are seeing softness in the market, particularly the communications sector.

Products

Catching up with more of the numerous new products announced at IMS that I haven't previously covered:

Analog Devices announced a 4-channel, 24-GHz receiver-downconverter MMIC for automotive radar. The IC has 22 dB gain with 10 dB noise figure and includes an integrated temperature sensor.

Qorvo launched three 0.5 watt PAs for small-cell base stations. Their low, mid, and high band PAs achieve 27, 29, and 22 percent power-added efficiency, respectively — a substantial improvement over the portfolio offered by ANADIGICS.

Qorvo also announced five 802.11ac PAs targeting home and CPE applications. The designs provide 4 to 5 points better efficiency,which is important for minimizing the power consumption in MIMO designs.

Markets and Technology

Google will be testing prototypes of their new self-driving vehicles this summer in Mountain View. Let me know if you see one.

A new book, Losing the Signal, chronicles the rise and fall of Blackberry. The New York Times interviewed the authors about the company and the book. It's fascinating that Blackberry missed the significance of the iPhone.

Looking for something else to read this summer? Bill Gates recommends a few books on some great topics.