At 07:38 PM 10/2/2008, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
>On the other hand, Microchip would dispose Atmel's ASIC
>business which is actually very good in terms of business
>sense. Atmel's problem is that they have too broad product
>lines but their profit (they were actually losing money)
>can not support the growth of the broad product lines.

Proportionately Atmel is now more profitable than Microchip! Mind 
you, a couple of years ago Microchiop weren't doing too well either!

Atmel, like many other major semiconductor firms, are pursuing a 
fab-lite strategy. Sell off fabs and then contract your work to who 
ever has the processes you need. That way you don't need to 
continually develop your own processes - concentrate on what you do 
best - design the controllers and processors.

In a way you should say that Microchip has in fact a much wider 
spread of product than Atmel. At least Atmel doesn't have to worry 
about an entire range of analog and conversion products. Atmel under 
the current management has gone back to what they know - memory, 
digital parts and crypto parts. The rest, as you say, can be easily sold off.

The upside for Microchip would be to get a range of solid ARM designs 
with both ARM7 and ARM9 technology. They get the new capacitive sense 
range, a memory range that nicely complements the uChip range and 
extends it well.

Kindly,
John

>They have started to closed down some fabs and obsolete
>some product lines (pissed off some customers already).
>But the steps are not bold enough.
>
>So in this aspect, Microchip is right.
>
>
>Regards,
>Xiaofan

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