Dialog buys Atmel

[Stonent]

If for some reason it all goes badly for the inexpensive MCU part of the company (what do I know) I wish it would make the Genuino people decide to start fresh, forget the 328P and make the base Arduino something more like an Uno sized version of the Teensy 3.x with modern speeds, real USB support (HID, MIDI) and an actual DAC or two onboard.

Well they could always move to an LPC1100.  They are available in DIP.

[free_electron]

my two cents says dialog is after atmels very succesfull touch systems. being able to integrate the touch system into the PMIC would be very profitable for them as they can shrink the device and boot one more part off the board. plus they can now do additional power savings as they know when a touch event happens.
combine that with an ARM license ... and you can now shove intelligent controllers in the pmic , tack on crypto memory and certain tasks can be run in the pmic as opposed to the big iron cpu. things like authentication. no need to wake big cpu. no authentication ? big cpu stays asleep ... good luck hacking through that. the power manager simply provides no power to the cpu...

[amyk]

There is a possibility that part of the reason to buy Atmel was a brand name recognition. Virtually nobody knows who Dialog is, but even 12 year old "makers" know Atmel (that thing on my Arduitiotino!!1).

And it will be really ironic if Dialog makes the Atmel name vanish as part of the Borgification process.

I'm hoping they might rename themselves Dimel or Atalog... or something completely different.

Maybe we'll get a better logo too?

[lgbeno]

my two cents says dialog is after atmels very succesfull touch systems. being able to integrate the touch system into the PMIC would be very profitable for them as they can shrink the device and boot one more part off the board. plus they can now do additional power savings as they know when a touch event happens.
combine that with an ARM license ... and you can now shove intelligent controllers in the pmic , tack on crypto memory and certain tasks can be run in the pmic as opposed to the big iron cpu. things like authentication. no need to wake big cpu. no authentication ? big cpu stays asleep ... good luck hacking through that. the power manager simply provides no power to the cpu...

This is a good theory and plays into Apples latest strategy for screen power management in the iPhone 6s.

In general though I bet it is a collection of reasons that the acquisition happened.  At the end of the day they now have a business that is 3billion dollars in revenue.  They have a huge variety of MCUs that are useful to sell, the crypto stuff as well as all of the products Dialog has.  They also have a sales force in North America which has much more reach than previously.

As for the name, its anyones guess. 


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[eas]

Highly specialized parts (ie Dialog) + high volume commodity parts (Atmel) seems like a good combo to have if you operate your own fabs.  One helps pay for upgrading fab, the other helps with spreading depreciation over a large volume.

[lgbeno]

I believe Dialog is fabless, Atmel should be fabless or be working towards that


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[Macbeth]

I believe Dialog is fabless, Atmel should be fabless or be working towards that

I disagree to an extent. Yes, specialisation and splitting up companies into core businesses, etc should help with free market economics and all that, but there is a shitload of bureaucratic red tape involved in doing it to every granularity which is just a fucking PITA and ridiculously wasteful and expensive when you know that you could just ask Bob from the other side of a Chinese Wall to chuck a few of these into his production for you, or you vice versa do the same favour for him.

[Psi]

If currently no-one knows who Dialog is they will probably throw 'that' name out the window and carry on as Atmel.
Losing the Dialog name would have zero effect on their ASIC business, they will be stamping customers logos on their ASICs anyway.

[lgbeno]

I don't think that there is any harm in keeping both names.  I don't want to see Atmel stamped on a PMIC, or dialog on an AVR.

Dialog does brand a lot of their ICs in the cell phones including the iPhone.

Regarding fab vs fabless.  Nothing drives efficiency like a P&L relationship between design and Foundry.  Bob is wayy more motivated to make your chip when $500k is on the line.


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[Rick Law]

I seriously doubt that when one company buys another similar sized company they throw half the business out of the window. They could sell the microcontroller and or memory business though so you guys (not me for sure!) could end up with MAtmelchip.

You may be right that it doesn't seem to make sense, but it happens all the time.  There is a school of thought that a company doesn't have a portfolio of products, instead, what it has is a portfolio of customers.

If the wanted 1/2 (of the business) can operate without added fix cost (to the acquirer's original fix cost), and can operate with small enough variable cost - the numbers can indeed work out.  Basically, the acquirer added a few product line for their existing customer, and acquired a whole bunch of new customers, and (figuratively speaking) just need the existing sales folks (core+new-x) to carry a few more brochures and make a few more stops.

Of course, ideally, x=new so the end result is just the existing sales folks (core) would do.  Actually, the sales folks are the ones they most likely keep - since the existing relationships needs to be kept at least for a while.  It is the x in the lab, in the production floor, in the accounting office...  in those categories, the ideal value of x is the number of acquired employees in that area so (core+new-x)=core.

The other 1/2 of the business they will try to convert, or they can be re-sold if profitable to do so.  If they start to make a line of business more independent, that is a good indicator that line of business may be sold.

That brings us to Dave's point which I agree.

If dialog buys Atmel, we can kiss goodbye to the small customers. Including the Arduino folks. They are quite important for a number of reasons.

But not important financially (to an MBA mind at least)

So, the key of the future would be "What is it that the MBA's (particularly younger) see?"
* I amended it with "younger ones".  Younger ones are less exposed to real-world experience thus more driven by raw numbers on a spreadsheet.

I suspect even within Amtel and years before this acquisition was dreamed, the "Arduino folks" category was long ago dropped off into "residual value" area of the spreadsheet.  Residual value (or whatever Amtel's company lingo calls it) is when no real new development investment is made, but just production related investment for as long as the product line(s) are profitable.  Most likely, this "Arduino folks" products is also the group under the most sever price pressure so there is not a lot of money to be made.

I suppose none of us not sitting at the table has the real answer now, but we will all know 3-6 month after the acquisition and then we can scream, or not.

[lgbeno]

Read any interview with Sander Arts and you'll find that Arduino is in fact one of Atmel's favorite assets.  As long as they keep him, I don't think things are changing.

Also I disagree with the sentiment of younger professionals, even those with MBAs.  Younger people are infinitely more capable of spotting emerging treads and being optimistic about future potential value.

Now if a product line was losing money with no growth in sight, that's a completely different story.  Depending on investors or pressure from the street, they would also need to make sure that they are meeting margin expectations.

Killing products ruins customer relationships and the semiconductor industry is very competitive, you can't just acquire customers then not treat them right then they would be gone.

We'll see what happens in the next 6 months, my guess is nothing too extreme.



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[Rasz]

and we have a first Dialog part (SmartBond DA1458x) rebadged to Atmel:
http://blog.atmel.com/2015/09/23/the-smallest-lowest-power-bluetooth-smart-solution-has-arrived/

no price on the chips, dev board announced at $25, but listed at $27.34 ?

[ataradov]

You are joking, right? The acquisition has not completed yet and won't be until the end of the year at least.

This part is from NMI, bought by Atmel last year.

[Rasz]

This part is from NMI, bought by Atmel last year.

in that case it makes zero sense, this part is directly competing with Dialogs SmartBond line, wonder which one will the kill

[ataradov]

Before the acquisition is completed both companies must operate as independent companies. So at least for 3-6 month you can forget about any news about this.

[tszaboo]

I suspect even within Amtel and years before this acquisition was dreamed, the "Arduino folks" category was long ago dropped off into "residual value" area of the spreadsheet.  Residual value (or whatever Amtel's company lingo calls it) is when no real new development investment is made, but just production related investment for as long as the product line(s) are profitable.  Most likely, this "Arduino folks" products is also the group under the most sever price pressure so there is not a lot of money to be made.

They should think of it as the best advertisement ever. They can reach thousands and thousands of students, hobbyist, hackers and put their name into their mind. It is absolutely the biggest ad campaign a company can dream of, and they even make money on it.
Similar way, Microchip is big with hobbyist, who are started using their analog and power supply ICs. Would you ever use a Microchip LDO? No, it is stupid, just use a TI, or ST one, it is cheaper better. But they use the PIC, so they use the LDO.
The company will never have any clue why this is happening. I see this often, companies have no idea how people perceive them, what we think about them. Even the sales people, not just the engineers.
Numbers are not telling the whole story.

[Simon]

I switched to Atmel AVR for two reasons, finding a stupid silicone bug in a pic which is mad and the arduino. C can be very daunting and so can having to set up a micro. If you are learning to progam in C so that you can program a uC you have the double wammy of learning the uC intimately. With the arduino you start with learning C and then later you can move to your own C program knowing that is you still use a ATMega328 and respect some pinouts you can fall back onto the arduino system if you need it or you can launch into independance, and voila, you are hooked on AVR. it's a superb marketing strategy. along with the fact that you get slightly faster program execution. I can't see them ditching AVR unless they want to abandon making uC's

[Karel]

The only reason I hope Atmel will stay alive is to keep some competition with Microchip.
Apart from that, I don't care about Atmel. We used it in the past but when we asked for Linux support they ignored us.
Now we are happily using Microschip and Atmel lost a customer. I know we are not big enough for Atmel to care about loosing us.
But we don't care about Atmel either. Byebye Atmel...

[Rick Law]

Read any interview with Sander Arts and you'll find that Arduino is in fact one of Atmel's favorite assets.  As long as they keep him, I don't think things are changing.

Also I disagree with the sentiment of younger professionals, even those with MBAs.  Younger people are infinitely more capable of spotting emerging treads and being optimistic about future potential value.

Now if a product line was losing money with no growth in sight, that's a completely different story.  Depending on investors or pressure from the street, they would also need to make sure that they are meeting margin expectations.

Killing products ruins customer relationships and the semiconductor industry is very competitive, you can't just acquire customers then not treat them right then they would be gone.

We'll see what happens in the next 6 months, my guess is nothing too extreme.



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re: "Read any interview with Sander Arts and you'll find that Arduino is in fact one of Atmel's favorite assets."

"Most favorite assets" is not the same as saying "most valuable assets".  The CEO can have their pet projects or pet products, but that only go so far.  When financial pressure mounts, "most valuable" trumps "most favorite".

re: "Also I disagree with the sentiment of younger professionals, even those with MBAs.  Younger people are infinitely more capable of spotting emerging treads and being optimistic about future potential value."

While I agree that younger people lacking biases developed over time may spot newer trends more readily, but I think you inferred the wrong thing from what I stated.  What I stated was "Younger ones are less exposed to real-world experience thus more driven by raw numbers".  This doesn't have anything to do with potential value of emerging trends as raw numbers can include "projected sales."  This has more to do with "vested interest", "emotional attachment", and other abstract factors such as "existing relationships between users and sellers,"  competition landscape, etc.  Many of the stuff comes from the experience of living in that world for N years.

[Rick Law]

I suspect even within Amtel and years before this acquisition was dreamed, the "Arduino folks" category was long ago dropped off into "residual value" area of the spreadsheet.  Residual value (or whatever Amtel's company lingo calls it) is when no real new development investment is made, but just production related investment for as long as the product line(s) are profitable.  Most likely, this "Arduino folks" products is also the group under the most sever price pressure so there is not a lot of money to be made.

They should think of it as the best advertisement ever. They can reach thousands and thousands of students, hobbyist, hackers and put their name into their mind. It is absolutely the biggest ad campaign a company can dream of, and they even make money on it.
...
...
Numbers are not telling the whole story.

re: "They should think of it as the best advertisement ever. They can reach thousands and thousands of students, hobbyist, hackers..."
Perhaps...  Steve Jobs continued to push Apple in the schools for a long while and much of the entertainment industry remain loyal to Apple stuff for a long time.

re: "Numbers are not telling the whole story."
My earlier reply stated it so as well - evident by my pointing out that younger MBA may not be as well disposed in understanding the abstracts and may rely more on raw numbers.  That said, while numbers may not be telling the whole story, but numbers will dictate how the story ends.  As one who learns the name "Amtel" merely because of Arduino, I sure would like the story ends in a way favorable to the Amtel MCU's, but I suspect the numbers may not be my ally.

[coppice]

The only reason I hope Atmel will stay alive is to keep some competition with Microchip.

That might make more sense if Atmel was Microchip's main competitor.

[Mechatrommer]

Apart from that, I don't care about Atmel. We used it in the past but when we asked for Linux support they ignored us.
Now we are happily using Microschip and Atmel lost a customer. I know we are not big enough for Atmel to care about loosing us.
But we don't care about Atmel either. Byebye Atmel...

be happy with your linux and the substandard archaic Fmips = Fosc / 4 pic chips... i wish i still can have buy attiny10 from the market... at the same footprint/competitor there is pic10f206, got nothing just an basic IO, 1MHz cpu. attiny got PWM, comparator adc IO etc, 8MHz cpu... YMMV...