The $6.7bn paid by Japanese semiconductor firm Renesas for US chip company IDT, specializing in power management and memory, suggests that the connected car field has regained its mojo after a few setbacks. Any impact from events like crashes of autonomous vehicles have tended to be confined to the firms concerned, such as Uber, and even then only caused temporary blips. Similarly, shares in suppliers to automobile OEMs, including chipmakers, have only suffered temporary dips on news of impending trade wars and higher tariffs on components. The bigger picture highlighted by the Renesas-IDT deal is that chipmakers are consolidating to become complete suppliers of silicon for all aspects of automobile processing, as vehicles increasingly resemble large computers. This consolidation is…