The US government is working with China based ZTE to lift its trade ban, and many report that the NXP deal is in the works and likely to happen very soon. China is the last out of eight big regulatory agencies who has to greenlight the deal before Qualcomm can finalize the acquisition.

Qualcomm first announced plans to acquire NXP back in October 2016 that for $44 billion. Earlier this year, Qualcomm increased the offer  because of  the good performance of Dutch based NXP in financial 2017.

Many analyst and industry insiders believe that the Qualcomm automotive effort would greatly benefit from the NXP acquisition, but Qualcomm made sure to communicate with analyst and press that it is pursuing automotive aspirations on its own. Of course, once the NXP acquisition becomes official, the two companies will try to make a joint automotive effort and make both players much more attractive.

NXP has good automotive sales channels and Qualcomm has computation, AI and wireless chips that can strongly benefit the NXP offering.

Many forget that NXP acquired Freescale semiconductor - the company behind its i.MX series of ARM based processor who became the part of NXP in December 2015. Let's hope that this saga will close soon.