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Microchip Technology to Buy Atmel for Nearly $3.6B
- nickpsecurity 11y agoGreat... more consolidation of major competitors to fix market problems like great features and prices from competition. Just what we needed.
- harigov 11y agoI believe some consolidation helps them reduce costs and improve efficiency. I guess every market consolidates into two to three big players eventually.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoIt's already at 2-3 big players. Further consolidation gets us closer to monopoly tactics. Let's just say tech consolidation is usually bad for the consumer. I see no reason that two, neck-to-neck competitors becoming one company will help us in long-term. We've benefited from those costs and product efficiency was great so far. I'm sure their costs and efficiency will improve. As usual. ;)
- foobarian 11y agoWhat is the 3rd player right now? AFAIK it's PIC or Atmel. I guess there are the various ARM boards but those tend to be more powerful than little 8 bit things.
- icegreentea 11y agoTI still makes MSP430s.
- duskwuff 11y agoAs well as a variety of ARM microcontrollers, including the confusingly named MSP432: http://www.ti.com/tool/MSP-EXP432P401R http://www.ti.com/tool/MSP-EXP432P401R
- hkmurakami 11y agoTexas Instruments maybe?
- nickpsecurity 11y agoIt's in the article...
- quanticle 11y agoST Microelectronics has a line of microcontrollers that are (largely) compatible with the Atmel AVR instruction set.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- onnoonno 11y agoNever heard of those. Do you have a link?
- quanticle 11y agohttp://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1847?sc=stm32nucleo http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN184... They advertise Arduino compatibility, so I'm assuming that means compatibility with the AVR instruction set, but I could be wrong about that.
- onnoonno 11y agoThank you. But that's just Arduino, i.e. high level compatibility. You have a setup() and a loop() and the same way to do I/O, but not the same underlying instruction set. The chips on these guys are regular ARM cortex uCs. They might be just barely fast enough to do real-time emulation of the AVR INSNs though ;)
- jason_s 11y agoRenesas is a huge microcontroller supplier that no one ever hears about for some reason. Other major competitors are NXP/Freescale, ST, TI, and Infineon.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI literally just posted that and deleted it in a comment. It had something else that was inaccurate. I was about to repost it just saying Renesas had SOC's, SuperH chips, and their on fab then saw you comment. :)
- petke 11y agoOn the upside. Less companies means fewer platforms and less fragmentation for developers to worry about.
- padelt 11y agoDevelopers routinely rely on this fragmentation for more options in the feature set vs. price product space. Such a merger will most certainly lead to some edge case configurations go missing. Lowered prices may be the only actual upside - if it materializes in the light of shrinking competition.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoExactly. This market demands that to find the right fit for a product and best value in performance/IO/watts/dollars. More options is always good for us. Anyone wanting to learn less can stick to one product family.
- restalis 11y agoLess companies means less wooing for end users and thus - a general quality drop in the long run.
- jason_s 11y agoAtmel's and Microchip's architectures are so different that I wouldn't expect any consolidation of platforms.
- saulrh 11y agoNah, there are lots of markets that have natural incentives against monopolies. For example, classic web hosting type things will probably never consolidate for a number of reasons ranging from the size and difficulty of the configuration space to being unable to retool when new technology comes along and new players enter. Chip design and manufacture, however, I can easily believe converge toward a monopoly, mostly because research efforts compound like crazy.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoAnd NRE costs. Lets not forget that. More consolidation every node.
- saulrh 11y agoRight, chip fabrication pipelines. Your lithography setup costs $15B, but once you have it set up you can manufacture anything. Ouch.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat's true for fabs but I was talking HW development. Mainly, the EDA tools and the masks. It's why some companies can specialize in offering USB or whatever on certain nodes. It's just that expensive to develop something like that.
- s73v3r 11y agoIt very well can. However, unless they absolutely have to, the company is not going to pass those on to customers. Think of it: If you could save 5 cents per part, and you didn't have to pass that savings onto anyone, just keep it for yourself and shareholders, why wouldn't you?
- lfowles 11y agoThis popped up earlier (w/ 20 comments as of now): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576
- pkaye 11y agoFrom my own experience, this might be a good time for Atmel employees to polish their resumes.
- jevinskie 11y agoWell, this isn't a particularly insightful comment, but my feelings about this are "fark :[". The AVR definitely has something Nordic about it. I first learned C when programming an AVR Butterfly eval board to take photos like [0] using [1]. I've found the AVR architecture to be much cleaner than 8 or 16 bit PICs. Atmel, for the most part, embraced GPL and GCC. Microchip has tried to squirrel GCC optimization features away from being truly FOSS. [0]: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg [1]: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg
- i_have_to_speak 11y agoDude, be careful what you post. These are the days when 10-year-olds can't afford to make spelling mistakes [1]. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-35354061 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-35354061
- colanderman 11y agoIIRC Microchip's 8-bit PIC line had poor/nonexistent GCC support because their terrible instruction set provided no way to maintain a data stack. Their own compiler just allocated everything statically. Granted, it's (thankfully) been over a decade since I had to use a Microchip microcontroller, and they've presumably improved since. But Atmel got it right from the start. GCC-AVR produced beautiful assembly and their ISA was a joy to use. RIP Atmel.
- Thetawaves 11y agoThis is a huge relief compared to the proposed acquisition by Dialog. Microchip is vastly more open. Crazily enough, You have to apply for a copy of a data sheet from Dialog instead of it being freely available on their website for everyone to download..
- sern 11y agoCool, maybe now it'll be possible to obtain Atmel chips in quantity without ridiculous lead times.
- gshrikant 11y agoThis is surprising news to me. An analog with the microprocessor market would be Intel buying AMD! I love Microchip's application notes. My first controller was a PIC16F877A and apart from the architecture quirks (and mediocre C compiler support) it is a good processor for beginners. In that sense, this acquisition nicely complements MT's own strengths. I'm still not sure how I feel about the monopolization of the uC though.
- throwaway7767 11y agoI tried both PIC and AVR when first getting into embedded development. I very quickly grew a strong distaste for the PIC instruction set (their docs were admittedly very nice). AVR was just so clean by comparison. It's a sad day, microchip really needed a good competitor.
- Zardoz84 11y agoThe whole swarm of cheap ARM micros that are now around or below the 1$ per chip, plus with free and sane C compiler ?
- tiwarivivek 11y agoI see a disconnect. Somebody knowledgeable, please comment. here it goes : Atmel had a deal with Dialog Semiconductor worth 4.6 Billion Dollars on September 15 already, refer [0] [1]. Microchip manage to break that deal with 137 Million dollar termination fee, but with a deal worth of 3.6 Billion Dollars. That's 1 Billion dollars "less" deal worth agreed by Atmel to be sold. Sounds unbelievable! MCHP managed to do this by giving more cash for Atmel shareholders? (..and not to forget 137 M of termination fine.) 1 Billion dollar (which was imaginary) disappeared into thin air?? If it was not of real value, then how / why Dialog over valued it? Whoever understands all this, please comment. [0] : http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog-semiconductor-acquire-atmel-46-billion http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog-semicondu... [1] : http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/
- wesleyy 11y agoI think you kind of answered it yourself. Microchip probably offered a higher portion of the deal in cash and atmel shareholders find the cash to be worth more than dialog stock.
- makomk 11y agoI think the value of the Dialog deal plummeted since a lot of it was to be paid in Dialog stock and their stock price dropped substantially since September.
- callesgg 11y agoI wounder if this will this bring the death of the original Arduino.
- hugs 11y agoI hope not, but then again, the conflict inside the Arduino project (Arduino LLC vs Arduino SRL) is a threat, too.
- smcl 11y agoI suspect it won't - even if AVR started to disappear the Arduino guys have already got a handful of boards out using ARM Cortex M0 and Intel Curie chips. They're quite cleanly integrated with the same IDE and the boards are in roughly similar form factor, so from a dev's perspective if they moved to ARM/Curie completely it wouldn't be too tough I reckon. Not sure if there's any supply chain or manufacturing issues that could complicate things though.
- jason_s 11y agoI commented in the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576: >People in this thread keep talking like this is the "death" of Atmel. I don't see it changing much other than being guided by Microchip management to meet higher profit margins. If you think that Atmel's compilers and IDE's are going to be dropped overnight in favor of MPLAB X and Microchip compilers, you are almost surely mistaken; there's a big gap between architectures so it would be a lot of work to get Microchip tools to support Atmel parts.