Intel Acquires Nortel, FTC Approves

It looks like a certain financial transaction that the world's prime supplier of CPUs was seeking, and which had been put on hold a while ago, has finally been approved by the Federal Trade Commission.

Intel seems to decide on buying companies quite often, though this is hardly surprising for such a large-scale corporation.

In fact, Intel is responsible for one of the biggest transactions that the IT industry has ever seen, that being the buying of McAfee.

This once, however, the business deal that the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant has been allowed to enact is quite a bit smaller.

Basically, the company is going to buy off all the intellectual property of Nortel, a bankrupt developer of telecommunications gear (the outfit filed for bankruptcy back in the month of January, 2009).

Nortel has already liquidated most of its physical assets and only has to finish parting with its roughly 6,000 patents and patent applications.

The main focus of said portfolio is on semiconductors, the Internet and wireless communications, though the full range of subjects is much more varied.

Either way, once the CPU maker finishes incorporating the technologies into its own collection, it should be able to even faster expand its horizons.

Still, there are some obstacles it will have to get past before doing this, the major one being the fact that other IT players want Nortel's IP.

More specifically, Ericsson, RPC, Apple and Google all want the technologies, meaning that Intel will have to outbid all of them.

In fact, Google has already been given approval as well, bidding $900 million, while Apple and Microsoft think the IP could help them counter Google's Android on the smartphone market.

The auction should commence next week. What remains is to see how much money starts being thrown around.