Reuters has reported that Qualcomm will purchase NXP for $38 Billion in the largest semiconductor deal ever.
This deal was rumored last month in a deal worth about $30 Billion. Qualcomm’s name should be familiar to all Hackaday readers – they have an immense portfolio of mobile processors, automotive chips, and a ton of connectivity solutions for WiFi, Bluetooth, and every other bit of the EM spectrum. NXP should also be familiar for their hundreds of ARM devices, automotive devices, and Freescale’s entire portfolio.
The deal for $38 Billion is just a bit larger than the previous largest semiconductor deal, Avago’s purchase of Broadcom for $37 Billion.
This latest acquisition has followed acquisitions of ARM Holdings by Japan’s Softbank, On and Fairchild, Avago and Broadcom, NXP and Freescale, Microchip and Atmel, Intel and Altera, and a few dozen we’re forgetting right now. The good news is this immense industry consolidation won’t result in a single gigantic chip maker; there will probably be two or three gigantic chip companies in the future. If I may dredge up an observation from a Mergers and Acquisition post from this summer, this trend didn’t go well for Hughes, Fairchild, Convair, Douglas, McDonnell Douglas, North American, Grumman, Northrop, Northrop Grumman, Bell, Cessna, Schweizer or Sikorsky. It went very well for Lockheed, Boeing, and Textron.
Hopefully NXP parts won’t go under the Qualcomm policy of “we don’t sell to you, and don’t expect to see our datasheets either”.
Hopefully Kinetis and Qoriq parts keep their longevity guarantees and decent documentation.
I guess first order of business is to have a horde of lawyers purge the internet of NXP datasheets and require NDAs
I know a lot of Freescale FAEs and other engineers looking at their shiny new business cards going, “Doh!”
They’re too busy answering calls from frantic customers right now to look at business cards.
Yeah. You dont know half of it.
Oh boy… this sounds exciting in all the wrong ways. Like when the well-intentioned professor says “Good news, everybody!”…
Also NXP datasheets are usually the best on the whole dang Internet… at least to my eyes. (FWIW, I look at a lot of 74xx part ‘sheets, because I can’t memorize ’em. Head’s too small. Why those old things? I’m sort of stuck in the 80s ;) ) I hope we’re not seeing the end of that. Good datasheets are at least as important as being able to get the parts themselves. You can’t use it if you don’t know how, unless you blackbox — and blackboxing is only very rarely worth the time and effort.
The 68HC11 pink books were the pinnacle of chip documentation. Even more recent Motorola docs weren’t as well written.
I have not heard of these… went looking, came up empty. (Google hates me, lol.) Can you post a link?
http://www.nxp.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/ref_manual/M68HC11RM.pdf for the family reference manual. There were separate databook manuals for each variant, and a pocket instruction set reference.
Especially note the section on EPROM and EEPROM cell programming and the assembly listing of the on-chip boot ROM in the back.
Holy crap, you’re not kidding around with this. I’ve literally never seen anything so detailed.
I wish MOS Tech had done this back in the day…!
Based on the recent price increases for Atmel parts, I would venture to say that prices for parts will continue to increase after this “deal”.
Sad to see all this semiconductor mergers, I don’t think it’s good for the industry.
Too big to fail banks, too big to fail car companies, and now too big to fail semiconductor manufacturers? Bad times ahead.
It has to happen. There is a lot of overlap between parts, so same dogs fighting for one bone, semiconductor fabs start with a $B and go up, so not enough profit unless you are fabless, the market is almost flat, This way, they can combine the best of both companies and dump the unprofitable. Life sucks for a while, then it gets better.
Oh, forgot. Then China announces it will invest $120B into the semiconductor industry. More dogs. One bone. Learn Mandarin. It will be ok.
sales isn’t growing so the only way to milk the stock market is to do mergers and spinoffs
the way i see it, either Qualcomm is going to see how NXP is making money by being more open about their parts and everyone wins or NXP is about to become very secretive like Qualcomm and everyone loses.
Usually the purchaser sets the corporate environment for the merger. I’d say your odds went from 50/50 to more like 90/10 toward becoming secretive.
Not always. In example take HP purchase of Compaq. Results sadly followed Compaq business practices rather than HP’s.
People before me said enough. So I can say:
Fuck Qualcomm.
Please don’t use the Q word in mixed company again.
Qual is German for agony, by the way…
Just don’t mess with my lpc17xx line!
Or my lpc8xx line! I work for a small company developing some products with the lpc824; I’d hate to have to start over with something else when Qualcomm ruins everything.
I’m an happy person after spending 6 months developping a very complex and modular sensing system based on Atmega RFR2’s and after the Microchip merger the chips doubled price, and availability has a been a bit worse…
Now about this one..
Rip iMX family the only decent A series ARM’s with FULL datasheets…
Wanna know what this chip does? Buy me 1 milion and sign a truck load of NDA’s.
Oh its just a 74HC buffer, woppsie..
I don’t like this at all.
Could do with downloading all the NXP datasheets but wget doesn’t work because they don’t have proper links to them on the site.
The adquisition is of $47b,not 38.
Shit, I hate Qualcomm, I knew it would end bad with all the acquisitions.