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Motorola Sells Chip Unit for $1.6 Billion
Rude Turnip writes "Motorola is selling its
semiconductor components unit to privately-held Texas
Pacific Group. Motorola hopes to concentrate on the high-end
semiconductor business that provides embedded chips, while
keeping some interest in the components business.
"
Sorry, you are mistaken.
I see the second copy of the story is gone, but for all the doubting Thomases out there, here is the link to it. http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /05/12/1444200.shtml
Yeh, how about they make a cell phone that wont slowly give you a tumor. Then I might accually get one.
>First of all, ENOUGH WITH THE "DEJA VU" COMMENTS!
>So far this discussion is content-free.
It's fat free too, basically this is Slashdot lite, less calories, more filling, in general better for you...
I wonder if Motorola shareholders are getting a fair deal. EE Times had a more thorough article (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990511S0032). The board ignored a higher bid that came in later, with somewhat circular excuses that the other bid "came very, very late in the process", and that the group had a "somewhat speculative ability to complete the transaction" (probably due to being forced to put it all together at the last minute).
Personally, I think they're gutting Motorola and this is the beginning of the end.
... and cigarettes don't cause cancer...
Wasn't TPG, or at least David Bonderman involved in the Continental turnaround? I think they (or at least Bonderman) has part of Beringer Wineries and Washington Mutual. Good News is they have a reputation for turning companies around and making them extremely profitable unlike some other venture companies that have reputations for being liquidators.
There's no scientific evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. All "evidence" is either empirical or hearsay. Correlation does not imply causality.
Refer to the post below this... it is not prooven that cigarettes cause cancer.
Of course there is an abundance of evidence showing a correlation between the 2 (cancer and cigarettes), but nothing can be prooven.
For all we know, maybe people who will get cancer are predispositioned to smoke... the argument goes both ways.
Nicotine isn't a carcinogen. It's merely the
addictive agent. The potential carcinogens
are tar and various other products of combustion.
As for whether cigarette smoking causes cancer,
you can't prove that definitively. There is
however a very marked increased incidence of
lung cancer in smokers compared to non-smokers which can't be accounted for.
There is also an increased risk of coronary
heart disease.
AFAIK, Motorola is retaining a 10% stake in
the former SCG and will continue to have
special deals/ relationships to ensure that
Mot gets the best possible support from
the new company, when it is spun off to
its own identity in a few months time.
It being a $1.5billion business in its own
right, I guess buying it for $1.6billion means
it should start making a bigger profit soon. Not being dragged down or dragging down the rest of
Motorola should help, and allow some inward
investment too.
None of the processor cores are affected by this
really, as it is all the discrete components that
are being shipped out in the components group.
Yeah right. That really explains why people
who chew tobacco and even people who role cigars
for a living have cancer problems too. I'd also like to hear your behavioral explanation for the fact that if you smoke and have other risk
factors like asbestos exposure, your risk goes as the
product of the individual risk factors.
Sophistry aside, at this stage of the game there
is about as much doubt in the theory that tobacco
causes cancer as in the theory that the earth travels around the sun. Get a clue.
Oh, there is no doubt that cigarettes cause cancer, but it cannot be prooven. Case closed.
Does this mean that my Motorola TTL manual is going to be obsolete? Surely they won't change the pinouts on the good ol' 74LS00 quad 2-input NAND gate chip!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Yes, I try to get all of my science from models and actresses too. After all, it's not like they might emotionally follow trends or anything.
Millions of people choose to smoke, drink, eat fatty foods or have risky sex lives, too. It doesn't mean these activities aren't dangerous...
No, but the fact that no scientific investigation has found any evidence after years of intensive study does suggest this is the case. Or are you one of those conspiracy lunatics who thinks that every single investigator is controlled by a Large Evil Corporation?
Maybe they settled.
Years ago the silicone implant companies settled a lot of lawsuits, but after years of studies, no data linking silicone and ill health could be found. It just doesn't happen!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
You're speaking of different thnigs. There's hard evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. It's been around for years now.
Cell phones haven't even been around long enough that such data can be reliably collected. It'll be several more years before anything truly conclusive can be drawn up.
By the way, the same theory which says that cell phones cause cancer also works for power lines, hair dryers, and other such nasties. Face it; being born inevitably leads to death.
Someone alert the media.
As far as I know, they (we) are only getting rid of the 'discrete' components, such as OP-amps. Personally, I feel it's a bit of a shame... I know of several designers who specify only Motorola parts when available due to the very high quality. But, I guess if we can make more profit by doing something else with the capital, that's what should be done...
:P)
Jim C. Nasby
Motorola AIEG (That's the automotive group, so don't bother asking me for a free cell-phone!
Maybe someone else with more information can comment, but I believe the problem with WinModems is not so much in writing the drivers, but in the licensing costs of the V.90 protocol.
Go see this page for a little more information.
Or, if you want to see why most of the real linux kernel guys hate Winmodems, follow this thread.
Alan Cox estimated 200k+ lines of code, running in kernel space.
So, forget about the specs. Even if you had them, they would be either too expensive to use or not worth the impact to the kernel to implement. Better off spending the few extra bucks, and taking a load off your CPU.
Personally, I haven't even heard of a plausible mechanisim. This is a far cry from ciggeretes where major components, like nicotine, are known carcinigens.
Actually, a woman won in court against Motorola over that. Her husband died because of a brain tumor, his wife blamed the cell phone and the court found Motorola liable. This was something like 4 years ago. Whether it was a frivolous lawsuit, I dunno. Maybe early cell phones really were dangerous, maybe she just needed to point the finger quickly. Either way, she won.
First of all, ENOUGH WITH THE "DEJA VU" COMMENTS! So far this discussion is content-free.
c essors-for.
Now, I think this is a good idea for Motorola. By selling off their components division they can concentrate more on advancing things like the PowerPC and, of course, all their embedded microprocessors. This, of course, means better Macs, better cell phones, and better whatever-the-heck-else-they-use-embedded-micropro
This may also help boost profits -- after all, how much do they really make on op-amps? It can't be all that much.
Anyway, I think it makes good business sense, sort of a trimming-the-fat move.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
A better Mac? Scarry!
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Never been proven..
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
didn't know /. had an RC team..
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I was initially worried when I heard the news about Motorola, because I like a number of their 8-bit chips for embedded work. But it sounds like what's really being divested is the non-CPU silicon, i.e. logic gates, and discrete semiconductors like transistors, diodes, and thyristors. Has anybody heard to the contrary? I 'm not working in a job right now where I have a Motorola rep I can call to be certain they aren't killing the 'HC11 and 'HC05. I like those chip families (it can be a matter of pride to be able to say the code you're working on runs in 512 bytes of RAM, with a 500 KHz clock).
It still does lovely things like dilate your arteries. Besides, who wants to put an insecticide into one's body anyway (nicotine, like caffeine, is a pesticide). It's just one of those things like not consuming most artificial dyes is probably a good thing, since most were originally developed by the German textile industry as textile dyes. It's not a hard rule, since, in this world, your poison may be my dietary nutrient. It's a good rule of thumb, though.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Anybody know if this sell-off includes their SM56 winmodem chipset? Hopefully this will loosen up programming documentation for it, since I'd like to write some Linux code.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There seems to be alot of misunderstanding about
/. come up with a decent "Batwing"?
Motorolas structur. The organization that produces
the CPUs and MPUs is not part of SPS, let alone
SPG.
SPG is Motorolas jelly bean factory. They make the
cheap commodity parts. Much of what SPS, the larger
organization that SPG belongs to, does is custom.
Look at your hard drive. There is a good chance that
there is a fairly large LSI flatpack with the
batwing logo. Commodity parts just clog up the
fabs. Other companies are better suited to cranking
out standard TTL and CMOS, etc. As far as anolog
ICs, most of the good stuff is made by a different
organization within SPS. SPS is still a huge part
of Motorola.
I spent 10 years with the company and enjoyed
every one.
Couldn't