8 ms·

Dialog Semiconductor to acquire Atmel for $4.6B

93 points by metaphor 11y ago

trymas 11y ago
As an Atmel customer, what does it mean to me? Will nothing change? Will Atmel's (or is it Dialog's ?) micro-controllers will become even more power efficient?
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Hell, what happens to Arduino?
  - stephen_g 11y ago
    Even if they stopped making AVRs together, there are plenty of other (arguably better) MCUs on the market anyway. At the company I work for, we've replaced all the Atmega chips in our products with the STM32F0 series chips for lower-end requirements and with STM32F4 series for higher end stuff, because they have more grunt and generally have more peripherals, and are similar prices.
    - meragrin 11y ago
      Are there any which are easily used breadboard style project?
      - wanderingjew 11y ago
        NXP's (and now Freescale's) LPC1100 are ARM Cortex M0 processors available in DIP packages. IIRC, NXP is the only one making DIP ARMs, but breakout boards exist....
        hga 11y ago
        There are indeed a bunch of them. Here's the ones STM provides: http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532 http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532
    - elsjaako 11y ago
      How many MCUs have the same strong, libre toolchain?
      - nascentmind 11y ago
        Free GCC tool chains are present for the TI MSP430, TI Tiva Series C (Cortex M4) and also TI Hercules (Cortex M3) series. Apart from that I have tried STM32F4 series with GCC tool chains. I have personally developed Bluetooth stack using the GCC tools for the MSP430 using the CC246x Bluetooth modules and it was a blast. So you have a lot of options with free tool chains. I personally use only free toolchains on linux. It is the best development setup and you have a lot of options for debugging and tool development.
  - trymas 11y ago
    According to user qq66, probably nothing. Though if Dialog is power management IC company, maybe Atmel's microcontrollers or Atmel based boards will have better power management features and/or be more power efficient?
- qq66 11y ago
  Most likely, nothing. This seems to be a channel-driven acquisition. Dialog wants to put Atmel products in its sales channels and its own products in Atmel's sales channels. And it looks like the product lines don't overlap much, so there shouldn't be significant anticompetitive effects.
binoyxj 11y ago
Here's why Dialog is buying Atmel for $4.6 billion http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/?xid=soc_s...
flyinglizard 11y ago
Atmel saw huge success with the AVR at the end of the 90s, and they had the ARM microcontroller market nearly to themselves with their SAM7 and SAM9 series of controllers. Unfortunately they dropped the ball when the Cortex cores came (and ARM really sprung into popularity) which ST gladly picked up and ran away with (around 2008, when the STM32F1 was introduced). What happened to Atmel is that they chose to invest their resources in the AVR32 series (riding on the success of the 8-bit AVR and the strong political position of the AVR group inside Atmel; IIRC the ARM group was in France while the AVR group was based in Norway), but they didn't read the market correctly. Everyone was going away from proprietary architectures and into the Cortex ecosystem (not always rationally) - customers bought into the pseudo-standardization ARM was selling them. This standardization was only perceived, as once you get into the 32-bit domain, the code is mostly C that can easily compile between cores - its the peripheral drivers that are non-standard and where most of the porting work exists and going from an ST Cortex to an Atmel Cortex is a big headache. Anyway, this shift in the market caught Atmel (and others, like Microchip and Renesas) off guard and pushed ST into the Cortex dominance it has today. Around that time, Atmel changed management and refocused the company (selling off their memory lines, other fringe products and their fabs) to be a primarily microcontroller company, but it was a bit too late and they found themselves behind. It's been a while since I worked with 8 bit micros, but the word is that their AVR series is not really innovative anymore. Seems like Atmel is back on its feet though with great new Cortex-F7 processors (I think they have the industry speed record at 300mhz and some other benefits). I haven't looked at the graphs, but $4.6bn is kind of a valuation low point considering their last 10 years or so. They probably understood that they're too small to survive by themselves, especially as how complicated microcontrollers are becoming. I don't think microcontrollers are such a fantastic business - talking to my friends at component distribution like Avnet and Arrow, they make a lot more money on some passive components (like power) than on micros, and for a long time some companies have been allegedly selling microcontrollers at a loss, just to get the designs.
- aceperry 11y ago
  Nice summary of Atmel. I had no idea that Atmel was not doing well. Atmel has the basic arduino business, although a lot of other architectures, especially newer and more powerful ones, are using the arduino framework for their CPUs. Even the newest official arduino platform is ARM based. I'm constantly reading about how the 8-bit market is still doing well, despite the emergence of ARM. Even though the AVR hasn't really innovated much, it has picked up a lot of peripherals and low power modes which has kept the AVRs from being strictly in the bargain basement MCU market. I don't think there has been much innovation in the 8-bit market, but the AVRs have a really good programming model, especially compared to the 8-bit PICs. I don't know if that's enough to give AVRs a shot at new designs, but they're one of the best 8-bit options today, IMHO.
bsder 11y ago
The problem is that the ARM Cortex microcontroller space doesn't have any differentiation left. As a microcontroller user, I care about two features: RAM and price. Really. That's it. I'll eat the engineering to switch lines if I can hold my price but double my RAM. I don't care about frequency--everything is fast enough. I care a bit about flash, but I'm almost never flash limited. If you don't have enough of the peripherals I need I won't buy, but everybody has a ton of peripherals since transistors are cheap. And everybody's tool chains suck equally so there is no advantage to be gathered there.
- hga 11y ago
  There are people who care about power as well, right? E.g. the security system where I'm living now has remote wireless units with fairly big lithium batteries that last roughly 10 years....
  - bsder 11y ago
    > There are people who care about power as well, right? Not as much as you would think. Battery life in the embedded space is mostly defined by how much you can stay off and what your leakages are rather than what your active current is--since you can quite often just stay asleep a little longer. Most of these microcontrollers are in the same range for leakage and are at the point where you have to start considering other leakage sources on the board (capacitors for example). It's Amdahl's Law in action: the big contributors have all been smacked down pretty much as far as they can (sure, you might get 10% here or there ... but it's going to be real work now) so now getting overall performance isn't so easy. If someone really wanted to get my attention with their microcontroller, they should produce a combined BLE/WiFi chip where the WiFi can be run off of a coin cell battery like BLE (that would mean something like 2mW transmit power rather than 200mW).
    - paulmd 11y ago
      In particular I suspect there's very few gains that can be made for wireless communications. My contention is that there exists a information-theoretic lower bound on the amount of energy it takes to transmit a given amount of information a given distance. Like a heat engine, at some point you can no longer make generational improvements in efficiency. You get asymptotically closer to the bound, you can't ever beat it. And wireless power tends to dominate the power budget of anything that uses it. High-bandwidth signals require more power to travel a given distance, low-bandwidth signals go farther on less power but transmit less information. Intuitively this is why you can go worldwide with CW (Morse code) on just a few watts of power, while a SSB signal on the same frequency doesn't go far at all. But I think you can mathematically support this by playing with the bandwidth+power terms of the Shannon-Hartley theorem. If we want to transmit a given amount of data per time unit, there are two natural extremes. We can either transmit it at the average data rate necessary, or we can race-to-sleep by blasting it out as fast as possible. I'm not sure which is more efficient given that SNR is inside the log2 of the S-H theorem, it depends on the relationship between SNR and bandwidth as you spread a given quantity of RF power thinner and thinner. Based on the log2 I would think this is an inverse-square kind of thing, making it an equivalent tradeoff. Showerthoughts: because of the Inverse Square Law, it's probably more efficient to make a mesh of multiple small hops than a single long shot. As the spacing of the mesh decreases to zero, you end up with a wire. Also, check out the ESP8266 chip, it doesn't have a BTLE onboard but it does handle the "SOC with low-power wifi" thing.

93 points by metaphor 11y ago

As an Atmel customer, what does it mean to me? Will nothing change? Will Atmel's (or is it Dialog's ?) micro-controllers will become even more power efficient?

voltagex_ 11y ago
Hell, what happens to Arduino?
- stephen_g 11y ago
  Even if they stopped making AVRs together, there are plenty of other (arguably better) MCUs on the market anyway. At the company I work for, we've replaced all the Atmega chips in our products with the STM32F0 series chips for lower-end requirements and with STM32F4 series for higher end stuff, because they have more grunt and generally have more peripherals, and are similar prices.
  - meragrin 11y ago
    Are there any which are easily used breadboard style project?
    - wanderingjew 11y ago
      NXP's (and now Freescale's) LPC1100 are ARM Cortex M0 processors available in DIP packages. IIRC, NXP is the only one making DIP ARMs, but breakout boards exist....
      - hga 11y ago
        There are indeed a bunch of them. Here's the ones STM provides: http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532 http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532
  - elsjaako 11y ago
    How many MCUs have the same strong, libre toolchain?
    - nascentmind 11y ago
      Free GCC tool chains are present for the TI MSP430, TI Tiva Series C (Cortex M4) and also TI Hercules (Cortex M3) series. Apart from that I have tried STM32F4 series with GCC tool chains. I have personally developed Bluetooth stack using the GCC tools for the MSP430 using the CC246x Bluetooth modules and it was a blast. So you have a lot of options with free tool chains. I personally use only free toolchains on linux. It is the best development setup and you have a lot of options for debugging and tool development.
- trymas 11y ago
  According to user qq66, probably nothing. Though if Dialog is power management IC company, maybe Atmel's microcontrollers or Atmel based boards will have better power management features and/or be more power efficient?
qq66 11y ago
Most likely, nothing. This seems to be a channel-driven acquisition. Dialog wants to put Atmel products in its sales channels and its own products in Atmel's sales channels. And it looks like the product lines don't overlap much, so there shouldn't be significant anticompetitive effects.

binoyxj 11y ago

Here's why Dialog is buying Atmel for $4.6 billion http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/?xid=soc_s...

flyinglizard 11y ago

Atmel saw huge success with the AVR at the end of the 90s, and they had the ARM microcontroller market nearly to themselves with their SAM7 and SAM9 series of controllers. Unfortunately they dropped the ball when the Cortex cores came (and ARM really sprung into popularity) which ST gladly picked up and ran away with (around 2008, when the STM32F1 was introduced). What happened to Atmel is that they chose to invest their resources in the AVR32 series (riding on the success of the 8-bit AVR and the strong political position of the AVR group inside Atmel; IIRC the ARM group was in France while the AVR group was based in Norway), but they didn't read the market correctly. Everyone was going away from proprietary architectures and into the Cortex ecosystem (not always rationally) - customers bought into the pseudo-standardization ARM was selling them. This standardization was only perceived, as once you get into the 32-bit domain, the code is mostly C that can easily compile between cores - its the peripheral drivers that are non-standard and where most of the porting work exists and going from an ST Cortex to an Atmel Cortex is a big headache. Anyway, this shift in the market caught Atmel (and others, like Microchip and Renesas) off guard and pushed ST into the Cortex dominance it has today. Around that time, Atmel changed management and refocused the company (selling off their memory lines, other fringe products and their fabs) to be a primarily microcontroller company, but it was a bit too late and they found themselves behind. It's been a while since I worked with 8 bit micros, but the word is that their AVR series is not really innovative anymore. Seems like Atmel is back on its feet though with great new Cortex-F7 processors (I think they have the industry speed record at 300mhz and some other benefits). I haven't looked at the graphs, but $4.6bn is kind of a valuation low point considering their last 10 years or so. They probably understood that they're too small to survive by themselves, especially as how complicated microcontrollers are becoming. I don't think microcontrollers are such a fantastic business - talking to my friends at component distribution like Avnet and Arrow, they make a lot more money on some passive components (like power) than on micros, and for a long time some companies have been allegedly selling microcontrollers at a loss, just to get the designs.

aceperry 11y ago
Nice summary of Atmel. I had no idea that Atmel was not doing well. Atmel has the basic arduino business, although a lot of other architectures, especially newer and more powerful ones, are using the arduino framework for their CPUs. Even the newest official arduino platform is ARM based. I'm constantly reading about how the 8-bit market is still doing well, despite the emergence of ARM. Even though the AVR hasn't really innovated much, it has picked up a lot of peripherals and low power modes which has kept the AVRs from being strictly in the bargain basement MCU market. I don't think there has been much innovation in the 8-bit market, but the AVRs have a really good programming model, especially compared to the 8-bit PICs. I don't know if that's enough to give AVRs a shot at new designs, but they're one of the best 8-bit options today, IMHO.

bsder 11y ago

The problem is that the ARM Cortex microcontroller space doesn't have any differentiation left. As a microcontroller user, I care about two features: RAM and price. Really. That's it. I'll eat the engineering to switch lines if I can hold my price but double my RAM. I don't care about frequency--everything is fast enough. I care a bit about flash, but I'm almost never flash limited. If you don't have enough of the peripherals I need I won't buy, but everybody has a ton of peripherals since transistors are cheap. And everybody's tool chains suck equally so there is no advantage to be gathered there.

hga 11y ago
There are people who care about power as well, right? E.g. the security system where I'm living now has remote wireless units with fairly big lithium batteries that last roughly 10 years....
- bsder 11y ago
  > There are people who care about power as well, right? Not as much as you would think. Battery life in the embedded space is mostly defined by how much you can stay off and what your leakages are rather than what your active current is--since you can quite often just stay asleep a little longer. Most of these microcontrollers are in the same range for leakage and are at the point where you have to start considering other leakage sources on the board (capacitors for example). It's Amdahl's Law in action: the big contributors have all been smacked down pretty much as far as they can (sure, you might get 10% here or there ... but it's going to be real work now) so now getting overall performance isn't so easy. If someone really wanted to get my attention with their microcontroller, they should produce a combined BLE/WiFi chip where the WiFi can be run off of a coin cell battery like BLE (that would mean something like 2mW transmit power rather than 200mW).
  - paulmd 11y ago
    In particular I suspect there's very few gains that can be made for wireless communications. My contention is that there exists a information-theoretic lower bound on the amount of energy it takes to transmit a given amount of information a given distance. Like a heat engine, at some point you can no longer make generational improvements in efficiency. You get asymptotically closer to the bound, you can't ever beat it. And wireless power tends to dominate the power budget of anything that uses it. High-bandwidth signals require more power to travel a given distance, low-bandwidth signals go farther on less power but transmit less information. Intuitively this is why you can go worldwide with CW (Morse code) on just a few watts of power, while a SSB signal on the same frequency doesn't go far at all. But I think you can mathematically support this by playing with the bandwidth+power terms of the Shannon-Hartley theorem. If we want to transmit a given amount of data per time unit, there are two natural extremes. We can either transmit it at the average data rate necessary, or we can race-to-sleep by blasting it out as fast as possible. I'm not sure which is more efficient given that SNR is inside the log2 of the S-H theorem, it depends on the relationship between SNR and bandwidth as you spread a given quantity of RF power thinner and thinner. Based on the log2 I would think this is an inverse-square kind of thing, making it an equivalent tradeoff. Showerthoughts: because of the Inverse Square Law, it's probably more efficient to make a mesh of multiple small hops than a single long shot. As the spacing of the mesh decreases to zero, you end up with a wire. Also, check out the ESP8266 chip, it doesn't have a BTLE onboard but it does handle the "SOC with low-power wifi" thing.