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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A good time to buy if you’ve got the cash

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A couple of corporate announcements this week have seen what you may – or may not – choose to see as consolidation in tough economic times and/or as companies moving to secure positions in some of the markets that might still show a bit of growth in the coming months.
For example, this week CSR, formerly Cambridge Silicon Radio, and SiRF announced that they are to merge. CSR is best known for its Bluetooth chips, in which sector it has a dominant market share, and it has recently expanded its technologies to include GPS, FM radio and wireless LAN (WiFi) functions in highly-integrated ICs that combine RF and microcontroller functions. In a concept it calls the Connectivity Centre it aims to combine several, or all, of the non-cellular RF channels that reside in a handset, in a single chip. CSR has been working in the GPS arena, especially with network-enhanced GPS techniques to provide fixes for location-based services in areas of poor signal.
SiRF is a long-established provider of silicon and software products for GNSS (and other) location technologies, with successive generations of its SiRFStar chipsetrs being used in products built by a wide range of OEM manufacturers.
The USA-base SiRF is to merge with a CSR subsidiary that will be created in the USA for the purpose, and SiRF shareholders – both are public companies – will then own just over a quarter of the combined group.
The "regulatory" form of the announcement with correct financial terminology is SiRF.
ARM also announced an acquisition; it has bought into the video processing space by taking over Logipard AB, a Swedish video IP company. Logipard supplies power-efficient video encode and decode acceleration technologies for the mobile and consumer markets, and says it is in phones by LG Electronics and two other leading mobile handset OEMs. The acquisition ARM says, enables it to bring to market the ARM Mali-VE multi standard video engine family of products, and making it “the only IP provider with ……an entire range of system elements, from memory controllers, interconnect, application and embedded processors to graphics processors, video engines, physical IP and embedded firmware.”
Conclusion? If there’s any hope of selling stuff into next-generation mobiles, you have to have video, and you have to have location; and if you (corporate “you”, that is) happen to have the cash, then grab them when the opportunity is there.

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