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September 11, 2006

Freescale May Be Sold

By Glenn Fleishman

The chipmaker, spun off from Motorola, may be purchased: The firm makes hundreds of different kinds of chips, including a wide array of silicon designed for embedded automotive and cellphone systems, but our interest here at Wi-Fi Networking News relates to ultrawideband. Motorola acquired the original UWB developer, XtremeSpectrum, folded it into the chipmaking division; it was part of the spinoff. This UWB approach is now in the minority—a minority of one, really—where the rest of the industry, led by Intel, is part of the WiMedia Alliance, which is rapidly pursuing completion of another UWB technology.

Will UWB survive this buyout? Several years with no shipping products and a delay of shipments of manufactured goods from January to March to July to next year, reportedly, doesn’t make it likely that hard-noses investors, on purchasing Freescale, will continue to authorize the division. Freescale is extremely successful in its other fields of endeavor, and I expect that following a sale, we will hear about a write-down for its UWB efforts, and then, eventually, how the firm has joined the WiMedia Alliance.

While multiple years of research is often supported for promising technology, as Freescale as continued to move away from its partners, drop its commitment from a trade group it formed with Motorola, and has not produced results, it’s just hard to see a conclusion in which they stay with classic UWB, as they defined it. They may still own patents that produce a revenue stream, of course.

If that’s not the case, I promise to buy the first consumer device produced with Freescale UWB chips.

Posted by Glennf at September 11, 2006 11:17 AM

Categories: Financial, UWB

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