ams AG entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in acam-messelectronic, a leader in highly accurate time-based measurement and related sensor solutions, in an all-cash transaction. Established in 1996, acam-messelectronic designs and markets sensor interface solutions based on the company's time-to-digital converter (TDC) technology. acam-messelectronic's time-based converter technology with picosecond resolution creates significant advantages for demanding sensor applications.
Shipping into industrial, infrastructure, medical, and automotive systems, the company’s CMOS-based products measure timing, capacitance, resistance and rotational speed at very high accuracy and speed with very low power consumption. acam-messelectronic’s technology offers superior performance in time-of-flight and ultrasound-based measurement applications. Adding acam-messelectronic’s time-to-digital sensor technology to ams’ portfolio of advanced sensors is a further step for ams towards shaping the world with sensor solutions.
acam-messelectronic is headquartered in Stutensee, Germany, and the company has approximately 25 employees. acam-messelectronic’s annual revenues reach the high single-digit million EUR range with attractive profitability. The parties to the transaction, which is expected to close within the next week subject to certain approvals and conditions, have agreed to keep the consideration confidential. Following the closing, ams plans to integrate acam-messelectronic’s activities in current and emerging markets into its existing business at the present location and to consolidate acam-messelectronic for accounting purposes from the first quarter 2015 onwards.
The core of acam messelectronic product range is represented by Time-to-Digital converters. A Time-to-Digital converter is a measuring unit for time interval measurement with an accuracy in the picosecond range. The measuring principle is based on the delay of simple logical gates. Despite of their strong dependency to temperature and voltage the use of appropriate control and calibration methods enables to use the gate delay as basic parameter for high precision time interval measurement. The possibilities of modern CMOS processes permit single shot measurements with an accuracy up to 10 ps (that equals 100 GHz). The favorable statistical behavior of the digital measuring circuit allows to increase the precision by averaging in the range of femtoseconds. With it's latest product range acam sets standards for all fundamental parameters, such as precision, measuring rate, double pulse resolution, pulse width measurement , current consumption.
