Newsmaker: Is the PowerPC due for a second wind?

How can a company be just about everywhere, and yet nobody knows its name? Just ask Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale Semiconductor.

Mayer's $6 billion Austin, Texas-based company, a recent spin-off from Motorola, is one of the 10 largest microchip manufacturers in the world. When it comes to brand awareness, it's another story.

While the public may not have a clue, industry insiders are quite familiar with Freescale. The company's best-known client is Apple Computer, which is under contract to use Freescale chips to build its G4 PowerPC computers through the end of 2008. The company has about 10,000 other customers, including the top 10 automotive manufacturers.

We are most probably going to revitalize our PowerPC. I don't know if it's going to be called PowerPC.

Recently, Freescale signed a multiyear electronics design partnership with Cadence Design Systems and also acquired CommASIC, a fabless semiconductor company based in San Diego that specializes in combining multiple wireless networking technologies onto a single microprocessor.

CNET News.com sat down with Mayer to talk about Freescale's evolution, as well as the future of the PowerPC architecture and the company's growing role in creating embedded processors.

Q: Will Cadence be responsible for all the chips that Freescale produces from the PowerPC, all the way down to small embedded wireless radios?
Mayer: Yes, everything. Even analog.

How much more are you planning on streamlining?
Mayer: Cost savings are one element, but it's really more about being more effective. Our existing structure, which was dispersed, allowed the centralized little groups to make their own decisions in terms of design tool environments. We didn't think it was going to make it...if we were going to grow, we needed to have a stronger and more stable design tools platform.

Speaking of growth, talk about your acquisition of CommASIC. How will it help with your future wireless designs?
Mayer: It was important for us to acquire the capacity to include low-power wireless LAN in our designs because increasingly, mobile phones are going to be multimode devices. I mean, 4G (fourth-generation wireless) is really going to be full multimode. You'll be able to switch between your network, your carrier, Wi-Fi, voice over IP, Bluetooth--whatever. To prepare for that, we needed to have a low-power Wi-Fi implementation.

I've seen both sides of the Apple story because I sold the G5 to Steve (Jobs) the first time he wanted to move to Intel.

It does seem that the company is going through some sort of a transition.
Mayer: It's more of an evolution of existing businesses.

Some analysts compare Freescale to Texas Instruments because you both deal with a lot of analog designs. What is it that appeals to you about analog?
Mayer: I think analog is very important. Analog, as you know, is what is required to deal with anything that's not purely digital, and not a lot of things in the real world are purely digital.

Are there unexplored areas that you'd like to go into?
Mayer: We've opened the design and quality center in Nagoya, in the heart of the Japanese automotive valley.

Consumer electronics is another area of growth for us. We have started to take technology that we put into cars and brought them to other consumer devices. The technology that moves the seats in the car moves the autofocus on a Canon Digital Rebel. The little microcontrollers that deploy air bags now go into toasters, into fridges, doing little functions like that.

Then, of course, wireless outside of Motorola is a huge growth opportunity for us, so that's where our focus is right now.

What about on the desktop?
Mayer: Desktop is a very small piece of our business, and it's going away. Our only customer is Apple (for laptops), and they are switching to Intel sometime next year. We were not happy to lose a customer, but frankly, with all of the growth opportunities that we have in front of us, it was not a good use of our resources to try to defend half a percent market share, which is how much desktop we have against Intel.

OK, Intel has the PC, that's fine. There are so many opportunities outside the PC that it's much better using our resources to try to go into spaces where we are really leaders.

Innovation is moving away from the PC space, and it's moving to consumer electronics. It's moving to the game console. It's moving to cars. It's moving to phones. iPod, that's where innovation is. So desktop is not a market that we want to serve.

More Newsmakers

[Captain_Spock]

This news certainly sounds great....

..."We are most probably going to revitalize our PowerPC. I don't know if it's going to be called PowerPC"... therefore -- OS/2 for PowerPC:

http://www.os2world.com/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?category=33&id=1111326518

[feranick]

BMW 7 series "v6"?

BMW traditionally and by definition doesn't use V6 engines, only 6 inline or V8 and V12. There is either a typo (v8?) or Mayer has no idea of what is talikng about.

[ccwilli3]

7 series V6

you are correct. No BMW V6s and surely not a 6 cyl in the 7 Series anyway. Maybe he means the V8 or the V12. Maybe he means the i6 in the 5 series...

Who knows... If not a typo, definitly says a lot about what he DOESN'T know about his customers' use of his product.

[Dibbs]

version 6

perhaps he was talking about version 6. the 7 series (as do all BMW models) has gone through several revisions. i don't know how many, but 6 does not seem unreasonable. not that all six have made it to the market. maybe one or two didn't because they thought of something better.

i think this makes sense because the current 7 came out in 2001. that's almost five years ago! plenty of time for at least 4 revisions, if not more.

[ray08]

He's correct on most of his statements...

I used to work for Cummins Engine Co. Their newest ECM (Control module) used the Motorola MPC555 PowerPC. The MPC555 was a "custom" PowerPC with ECM enhancements such as a bank of timers (to control injectors) and on board Flash memory. BTW, the Cummins ECM's were built by Motorola (now Freescale) in Seguin Texas. Ford is also a really big Freescale customer.

[WESTCOASTCORES]

CUMMINS ECM'S

I HAPPEN TO SEE THESE COMMENTS THAT U WORKED FOR CUMMINS. MY NAME IS DON JENNER AND IM WITH JBALL ELEACTRONICS DIV OF WWW.WESTCOASTCORES.COM ,WERE RECONDITIONING CUMMINS ECM'S DETROIT,CAT ETC. I THOUGHT I'D TRY AND PICK YOUR MIND ON SOME OF THE COMPONENTS USED IN THE CUMMINS ECM'S.WE RECALIBRATE AND NOW WERE TRYING TO REPAIR THEM AND WE'RE INTERESTED ON WHERE WE CAN ACQUIRE COILS THAT ARE FAULTY,ETC DO U HAVE INFO OR LEADS ON ANYTHING WE NEED TO LOOK OUT FOR?

Ouch.

>Q: Will Cadence be responsible for all the
>chips that Freescale produces from the PowerPC,
>all the way down to small embedded wireless
>radios?

>Mayer: Yes, everything. Even analog.

>How much more are you planning on streamlining?

>Mayer: Cost savings are one element, but it's
>really more about being more effective. Our
>existing structure, which was dispersed, >allowed the centralized little groups to make
>their own decisions in terms of design tool
>environments. We didn't think it was going to
>make it...

Translation:

1. All of our chips will now be designed
by Cadence. . . in India.

2. You'd better believe that this is about
cost savings. It's also about the stock price.

3. I don't want those little Engineers making
decisions about which chip design tools to get.
That's a management decision.

4. Intel has kicked the cr-p out of us on
the desktop, and is about to take over the
cell phone market, but, by golly, we still
have the car chip market!


Wow. Time to sell your stock, people.

[feranick]

inline 6 in Europe

The 7 series is available in Europe with two inline 6: the 730i (3 liters, gas), and the 730d (3 liters, diesel.

[feranick]

Sorry...

... this post was supposed to be a reply for my previous post...

[javierlopezroman]

error? yes, but who's?

One cannot assume that the the interviewed is the source of the error. It could be the writer or editor. It could be bad notes or a single incident of mis-spoken words.

See, most people assume (believe) that a 6cyl engine is in a V configuration, just as it is virtually known (assumed) that all 4cyl engines are inline (I or L) configurations.

One should not make definite statements without definity.

[napi1962]

PowerPC and Automotive industry

Although processors from Freescale and Intel are being used widely in the automotive industry, many car manufacturers are going JVM to side-step the headaches of having to support the numerous platforms/OSes.

[Captain_Spock]

The assumption is that JVM...

... is short for Java Virtual Machine (and, this runs best on OS/2); is that correct! ;-)

[Lolo Gecko]

7448 could be a winner

:)