Microchip has long claimed that it is the largest-volume producer of MCU's. That may, in fact, be the case, but if you consider the many makers of 805x chips, it may be to their advantage to reduce the number of 805x makers by buying up the ones that are losing market share, simply to enhance their claim of market dominance.

I actually wasn't aware that SMSC was an 805x maker, but I was aware that they had, over the years, acquired license to manufacture a wide range of no-longer-popular LSI's and ASIC's, for the replacement market. One that I found very interesting was the 34C80(?), which was an EPP-target interface that once was touted as being able to emulate a PC-AT (ISA) bus, including the DRAM support at an 8-MHz 286-equivalent rate. They also took over production of the Western-Digital HDC and FDC chips for a time. I don't know what their repertiore was when Microchip acquired them, but they did own the licenses.

RE