
Microchip Technology to Buy Atmel for Nearly $3.6B - mkeeter
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/microchip-technology-to-buy-atmel-for-nearly-3-6-billion.html?_r=0
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jevinskie
Well, this isn't a particularly insightful comment, but my feelings about this
are "fark :[". The AVR definitely has something Nordic about it. I first
learned C when programming an AVR Butterfly eval board to take photos like [0]
using [1]. I've found the AVR architecture to be much cleaner than 8 or 16 bit
PICs. Atmel, for the most part, embraced GPL and GCC. Microchip has tried to
squirrel GCC optimization features away from being truly FOSS.

[0]:
[https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg)

[1]:
[https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg)

~~~
hjalle
Out of curiosity, what does "something Nordic" refer to?

~~~
ballooney
I interpreted it as:

Elegant, clean design (certainly compared to the old 8-bit PICs). Good taste.
FOSS-friendly.

Microchip might be a Texan oilman in this comparison. Just keep pumping them
PICs out don't listen to those commies with their 'GCC' and their 'lee-nux' \-
sounds foreign and suspicious.

This is obviously a tongue-in-cheek characterisation but I think that's what
the OP was getting at.

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nickpsecurity
Great... more consolidation of major competitors to fix market problems like
great features and prices from competition. Just what we needed.

~~~
harigov
I believe some consolidation helps them reduce costs and improve efficiency. I
guess every market consolidates into two to three big players eventually.

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nickpsecurity
It's already at 2-3 big players. Further consolidation gets us closer to
monopoly tactics. Let's just say tech consolidation is usually bad for the
consumer. I see no reason that two, neck-to-neck competitors becoming one
company will help us in long-term. We've benefited from those costs and
product efficiency was great so far.

I'm sure _their_ costs and efficiency will improve. As usual. ;)

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foobarian
What is the 3rd player right now? AFAIK it's PIC or Atmel. I guess there are
the various ARM boards but those tend to be more powerful than little 8 bit
things.

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quanticle
ST Microelectronics has a line of microcontrollers that are (largely)
compatible with the Atmel AVR instruction set.

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onnoonno
Never heard of those. Do you have a link?

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quanticle
[http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN184...](http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1847?sc=stm32nucleo)

They advertise Arduino compatibility, so I'm assuming that means compatibility
with the AVR instruction set, but I could be wrong about that.

~~~
onnoonno
Thank you.

But that's just Arduino, i.e. high level compatibility. You have a setup() and
a loop() and the same way to do I/O, but not the same underlying instruction
set.

The chips on these guys are regular ARM cortex uCs.

They might be just barely fast enough to do real-time emulation of the AVR
INSNs though ;)

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tiwarivivek
I see a disconnect. Somebody knowledgeable, please comment.

here it goes :

Atmel had a deal with Dialog Semiconductor worth 4.6 Billion Dollars on
September 15 already, refer [0] [1].

Microchip manage to break that deal with 137 Million dollar termination fee,
but with a deal worth of 3.6 Billion Dollars.

That's 1 Billion dollars "less" deal worth agreed by Atmel to be sold.

Sounds unbelievable!

MCHP managed to do this by giving more cash for Atmel shareholders? (..and not
to forget 137 M of termination fine.)

1 Billion dollar (which was imaginary) disappeared into thin air??

If it was not of real value, then how / why Dialog over valued it?

Whoever understands all this, please comment.

[0] : [http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog-
semicondu...](http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog-
semiconductor-acquire-atmel-46-billion) [1] :
[http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-
atmel/](http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/)

~~~
wesleyy
I think you kind of answered it yourself. Microchip probably offered a higher
portion of the deal in cash and atmel shareholders find the cash to be worth
more than dialog stock.

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lfowles
This popped up earlier (w/ 20 comments as of now):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576)

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gshrikant
This is surprising news to me. An analog with the microprocessor market would
be Intel buying AMD!

I love Microchip's application notes. My first controller was a PIC16F877A and
apart from the architecture quirks (and mediocre C compiler support) it is a
good processor for beginners. In that sense, this acquisition nicely
complements MT's own strengths.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the monopolization of the uC though.

~~~
throwaway7767
I tried both PIC and AVR when first getting into embedded development. I very
quickly grew a strong distaste for the PIC instruction set (their docs were
admittedly very nice).

AVR was just so clean by comparison. It's a sad day, microchip really needed a
good competitor.

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Zardoz84
The whole swarm of cheap ARM micros that are now around or below the 1$ per
chip, plus with free and sane C compiler ?

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pkaye
From my own experience, this might be a good time for Atmel employees to
polish their resumes.

~~~
gherkin0
I know someone at Atmel, and many employees are only still there because of
promised severance packages.

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Thetawaves
This is a huge relief compared to the proposed acquisition by Dialog.
Microchip is vastly more open. Crazily enough, You have to apply for a copy of
a data sheet from Dialog instead of it being freely available on their website
for everyone to download..

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jason_s
I commented in the other thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576):

>People in this thread keep talking like this is the "death" of Atmel. I don't
see it changing much other than being guided by Microchip management to meet
higher profit margins. If you think that Atmel's compilers and IDE's are going
to be dropped overnight in favor of MPLAB X and Microchip compilers, you are
almost surely mistaken; there's a big gap between architectures so it would be
a lot of work to get Microchip tools to support Atmel parts.

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sern
Cool, maybe now it'll be possible to obtain Atmel chips in quantity without
ridiculous lead times.

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callesgg
I wounder if this will this bring the death of the original Arduino.

~~~
smcl
I suspect it won't - even if AVR started to disappear the Arduino guys have
already got a handful of boards out using ARM Cortex M0 and Intel Curie chips.
They're quite cleanly integrated with the same IDE and the boards are in
roughly similar form factor, so from a dev's perspective if they moved to
ARM/Curie completely it wouldn't be too tough I reckon. Not sure if there's
any supply chain or manufacturing issues that could complicate things though.

