The Conexant buy is expected to close in the first half. It's unclear what will happen to Conexant's Newport Beach headquarters, which employs about 250 people. Conexant makes chips for multifunction office printers, digital picture frames, PC speakers and other devices. It has yearly sales of about $200 million. Standard Microsystems makes chips for disk drives, keyboards, Universal Serial Bus ports, networking devices, portable electronics and industrial uses. It has yearly sales of about $400 million. The sale caps a turnaround effort at Conexant since the 2008 arrival of Chief Executive Scott Mercer. In the past two years, Conexant has reworked debt, sold stock and debt, sold a chunk of land near its headquarters and done a handful of patent sales. Mercer's also nixed underperforming products, shed units that weren't profitable or growing and made small buys to get into markets set to grow.