Samsung Electronics has purchased the mobile arm of U.K chipmaker CSR for $310 million, the companies announced on Tuesday.

The deal was done largely to get rights to some of CSR’s portfolio of mobile patents involving, “ handset connectivity technology” — largely CSR’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, FM and GPS technologies.

CSR also said that Samsung has purchased a 4.9% stake in the company.

“We have great IP. That was one of the reasons Samsung was so interested in us,” CSR CEO Joep van Beurden said in a conference call.”The patents are relevant to the area that Samsung wants to compete in.”

In an interview with Reuters, Mr. van Beurden expanded on why he believes Samsung initiated the deal.

“There is a big war going on between the giants of the semiconductor industry like Qualcomm, Intel and Samsung LSI to deliver the complete solution into smartphones,” he said. “Our team and technology – location and connectivity – is in its own right an extremely important part of that platform, but it is even more important if it completes your product offering and that is exactly what Samsung is doing.”

Samsung is acquiring these patents to enhance its proprietary Exynos processor as the market demands more and more low power draw System on a Chip (SoCs) units. Samsung is also trying to leverage the Exynos chip against NVIDIA’s Tegra line, as the fourth iteration of the line is expected in 2013.

This is not the first acquisition of a chipmaker by Samsung. The company purchased a Swedish firm called Nanoradio in January. Nanoradio specializes in energy efficient WiFi chipsets.

If speculation holds true, the iPhone 5 will be powered by a Exynos 4 quad-core processor and this patent acquisition by Samsung may be very telling of what will be enhanced on the new phone.