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 of events like crashes of autonomous vehicles have tended to be confined to the firms concerned, such as Uber, and even then only causing temporary blips. Similarly shares in suppliers to automobile OEMs including chip makers 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 chip makers are consolidating to become complete suppliers of silicon for all aspects of automobile processing, as vehicles increasingly resemble large computers. This…