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SAN FRANCISCO, July 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. top chipmaker Intel Inc. announced Thursday that it plans to buy a small programmable chipmaker eASIC to diversify its chipmaking business beyond its traditional computer CPU chips.

Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Programmable Solutions Group, disclosed in an "opinion editorial" the company's planned acquisition of eASIC without any words about the specific amount of the deal.

Californian-based eASIC is a chipmaker focused on producing application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) units, which McNamara said "has a proven, 19-year success record, leading products and a world-class team."

The merger deal is expected to be closed in the third quarter of this year and eASIC will join Intel's Programmable Solutions Group.

"The addition of eASIC will help us meet customers' diverse needs of time-to-market, features, performance, cost, power and product life cycles," McNamara said.

He said Intel has in recent years expanded its products and introduced breakthrough innovations in memory, modems, purpose-built ASICs, vision processing units and FPGAs.

Intel's acquisition of eASIC will help the world leading chipmaker better address high-performance and power-constrained applications to be used in the market segments like 4G and 5G wireless, networking and IoT, McNamara said.