
Dialog Semiconductor to acquire Atmel for $4.6B - metaphor
http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog-semiconductor-acquire-atmel-46-billion
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flyinglizard
Atmel saw huge success with the AVR at the end of the 90s, and they had the
ARM microcontroller market nearly to themselves with their SAM7 and SAM9
series of controllers. Unfortunately they dropped the ball when the Cortex
cores came (and ARM really sprung into popularity) which ST gladly picked up
and ran away with (around 2008, when the STM32F1 was introduced). What
happened to Atmel is that they chose to invest their resources in the AVR32
series (riding on the success of the 8-bit AVR and the strong political
position of the AVR group inside Atmel; IIRC the ARM group was in France while
the AVR group was based in Norway), but they didn't read the market correctly.
Everyone was going away from proprietary architectures and into the Cortex
ecosystem (not always rationally) - customers bought into the pseudo-
standardization ARM was selling them. This standardization was only perceived,
as once you get into the 32-bit domain, the code is mostly C that can easily
compile between cores - its the peripheral drivers that are non-standard and
where most of the porting work exists and going from an ST Cortex to an Atmel
Cortex is a big headache. Anyway, this shift in the market caught Atmel (and
others, like Microchip and Renesas) off guard and pushed ST into the Cortex
dominance it has today.

Around that time, Atmel changed management and refocused the company (selling
off their memory lines, other fringe products and their fabs) to be a
primarily microcontroller company, but it was a bit too late and they found
themselves behind. It's been a while since I worked with 8 bit micros, but the
word is that their AVR series is not really innovative anymore.

Seems like Atmel is back on its feet though with great new Cortex-F7
processors (I think they have the industry speed record at 300mhz and some
other benefits).

I haven't looked at the graphs, but $4.6bn is kind of a valuation low point
considering their last 10 years or so. They probably understood that they're
too small to survive by themselves, especially as how complicated
microcontrollers are becoming. I don't think microcontrollers are such a
fantastic business - talking to my friends at component distribution like
Avnet and Arrow, they make a lot more money on some passive components (like
power) than on micros, and for a long time some companies have been allegedly
selling microcontrollers at a loss, just to get the designs.

~~~
aceperry
Nice summary of Atmel. I had no idea that Atmel was not doing well. Atmel has
the basic arduino business, although a lot of other architectures, especially
newer and more powerful ones, are using the arduino framework for their CPUs.
Even the newest official arduino platform is ARM based.

I'm constantly reading about how the 8-bit market is still doing well, despite
the emergence of ARM. Even though the AVR hasn't really innovated much, it has
picked up a lot of peripherals and low power modes which has kept the AVRs
from being strictly in the bargain basement MCU market. I don't think there
has been much innovation in the 8-bit market, but the AVRs have a really good
programming model, especially compared to the 8-bit PICs. I don't know if
that's enough to give AVRs a shot at new designs, but they're one of the best
8-bit options today, IMHO.

~~~
flyinglizard
Arduino has been huge for Atmel in terms of brand recognition and popularity
of AVRs, but overall, its not a huge revenue source (even if 1m Arduino boards
are sold yearly, that's at best $3m-$4m in sales). Of course that there are
indirect benefits.

Most of the designs I know, migrate away from 8 bits and into 32 bit. The
Cortex M0 is great. While designing with 8 bit is somewhat of an upgrade dead-
end, if you design a product with an ST Cortex-M0, you can pretty easily go up
their Cortex family ladder while retaining a lot of compatibility on both the
board and firmware levels (ST is particularly good at that, which is why its
my default recommendation when designing a new product - I can explain why if
anyone is interested). The denser 8 bit parts are really expensive anyway - I
suspect its because manufacturers know its mostly "locked in" customers that
need more flash or I/O for an existing design and need a more capable, near
drop-in replacement.

I also vastly prefer AVRs to PICs, but AVRs were kinda where I started my
embedded programming career so I guess I just reflect on them fondly.

~~~
paulmd
Please do. I can easily see the benefits of being able to upgrade a chip while
retaining software/hardware compatibility but I'd love to hear any other
selling points. Are they reasonably competitive with equivalent AVRs in terms
of cost and power? Do they have a PicoPower equivalent?

~~~
flyinglizard
PicoPower - I can't tell you the specifics, as comparing power consumption is
a bit difficult (you need to figure out which peripherals you need running,
whats the system clock, input voltage, sleep/wakeup regime etc and calculate
from there), but they do have STM32L0 series of ultra-low power based on
Cortex-M0+.

As to why do I like ST:

1\. They are very easy to design boards for. Each IO pin on the Cortex micros
maps to up to 16 different internal functions. That gives amazing flexibility
from the board design perspective.

2\. They have fantastic long term migration paths. You can directly go from
Cortex-M3 to Cortex-M4 to Cortex-M7, while, in many cases, retaining package
compatibility.

3\. They have very good design validation. Their errata sheets are quite
shorter than what I remember working with other manufacturers.

4\. They have a huge amount of useful IO, such as timers (I have one design
using over 15 timer channels) and a quite flexible and powerful ADC
architecture.

5\. They probably have the widest selection of Cortex microcontrollers in the
industry.

There are downsides, too; I generally find their peripherals less advanced
than Atmel's (regular CAN instead of CAN-FD, USB inferior to Atmel's, I2C
that's really sucky and prone to errors, slower clock and no dual precision
FPU on the new F7 family). There was also some story with ST's 2MB flash
parts, being not really usable - but I'm not sure what was that about.

Overall you can't go wrong with ST. The long term migration ability and board
design flexibility are well worth the downsides.

Coming from an AVR, you're immediately going to get way more memory, much
higher clock frequencies, ARM CMSIS libraries (fun if you have any math/DSP
going on) and more industry standard tools.

~~~
akiselev
Unfortunately STM uses a lot of external silicon IP (all MCU designers have
to) from different firms that don't really work well together or are straight
up inferior as you mentioned.

Their eratta sheets are shorter but I've run into a number of problems that
I've worked around with help from their engineers and a year later I still
couodnt find any notes on them. I'm guessing they underreport edge case
silicon bugs like almost all silicon manufacturers.

My last project used a STM32F437 with 100 mbit ethernet, just about saturating
the connection at 80mbits while maxing out the processor to interleave the
bits of all incoming data and bit banging every GPIO unused by peripherals to
control 30k individually adressable LEDs at 45 fps which is just incredible
for a $7-10 microcontroller. Then after a few weeks of field testing we
identified half a dozen problems all resulting in nondeterministic failures of
the DMA or MAC peripheral requiring a hard reset. I think the most problematic
one, DMA1 or DMA2 stalling when they tick within 10-20 cycles of each other,
is the only one that was added to the errata and still plagues the STM32F4x7
parts.

That said if you care about part swapability, developer productivity, and need
a very powerful ARM that you're not pushing to the edge, the STM32 line of
chips is a great choice.

~~~
flyinglizard
That sounds nasty. I've had my share of problem with Atmel parts though when
operating at high rates - on their Cortex-M3 and SAM9 there were problems of
AHB overruns and data loss when doing fast Ethernet or SPI transfers. No hard
lockups though.

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bsder
The problem is that the ARM Cortex microcontroller space doesn't have any
differentiation left.

As a microcontroller user, I care about two features: RAM and price.

Really. That's it. I'll eat the engineering to switch lines if I can hold my
price but double my RAM.

I don't care about frequency--everything is fast enough. I care a bit about
flash, but I'm almost never flash limited. If you don't have _enough_ of the
peripherals I need I won't buy, but everybody has a ton of peripherals since
transistors are cheap. And everybody's tool chains suck equally so there is no
advantage to be gathered there.

~~~
hga
There are people who care about power as well, right? E.g. the security system
where I'm living now has remote wireless units with fairly big lithium
batteries that last roughly 10 years....

~~~
bsder
> There are people who care about power as well, right?

Not as much as you would think.

Battery life in the embedded space is mostly defined by how much you can stay
off and what your leakages are rather than what your active current is--since
you can quite often just stay asleep a little longer.

Most of these microcontrollers are in the same range for leakage and are at
the point where you have to start considering other leakage sources on the
board (capacitors for example).

It's Amdahl's Law in action: the big contributors have all been smacked down
pretty much as far as they can (sure, you might get 10% here or there ... but
it's going to be real work now) so now getting overall performance isn't so
easy.

If someone _really_ wanted to get my attention with their microcontroller,
they should produce a combined BLE/WiFi chip where the WiFi can be run off of
a coin cell battery like BLE (that would mean something like 2mW transmit
power rather than 200mW).

~~~
paulmd
In particular I suspect there's very few gains that can be made for wireless
communications. My contention is that there exists a information-theoretic
lower bound on the amount of energy it takes to transmit a given amount of
information a given distance. Like a heat engine, at some point you can no
longer make generational improvements in efficiency. You get asymptotically
closer to the bound, you can't ever beat it. And wireless power tends to
dominate the power budget of anything that uses it.

High-bandwidth signals require more power to travel a given distance, low-
bandwidth signals go farther on less power but transmit less information.
Intuitively this is why you can go worldwide with CW (Morse code) on just a
few watts of power, while a SSB signal on the same frequency doesn't go far at
all. But I think you can mathematically support this by playing with the
bandwidth+power terms of the Shannon-Hartley theorem.

If we want to transmit a given amount of data per time unit, there are two
natural extremes. We can either transmit it at the average data rate
necessary, or we can race-to-sleep by blasting it out as fast as possible. I'm
not sure which is more efficient given that SNR is inside the log2 of the S-H
theorem, it depends on the relationship between SNR and bandwidth as you
spread a given quantity of RF power thinner and thinner. Based on the log2 I
would think this is an inverse-square kind of thing, making it an equivalent
tradeoff.

Showerthoughts: because of the Inverse Square Law, it's probably more
efficient to make a mesh of multiple small hops than a single long shot. As
the spacing of the mesh decreases to zero, you end up with a wire.

Also, check out the ESP8266 chip, it doesn't have a BTLE onboard but it does
handle the "SOC with low-power wifi" thing.

~~~
bsder
> Also, check out the ESP8266 chip, it doesn't have a BTLE onboard but it does
> handle the "SOC with low-power wifi" thing.

I know all about it. Still won't run on a coin cell.

Nobody will build a 2mW WiFi chip until Apple forces somebody to build it.
Then _EVERYBODY_ will rush to build it. Then _EVERYBODY_ -1 will go bankrupt
when Apple doesn't use their chip.

It's the Zen of Hardware.

------
binoyxj
Here's why Dialog is buying Atmel for $4.6 billion
[http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-
atmel/?xid=soc_s...](http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-
atmel/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE)

------
trymas
As an Atmel customer, what does it mean to me?

Will nothing change? Will Atmel's (or is it Dialog's ?) micro-controllers will
become even more power efficient?

~~~
voltagex_
Hell, what happens to Arduino?

~~~
stephen_g
Even if they stopped making AVRs together, there are plenty of other (arguably
better) MCUs on the market anyway.

At the company I work for, we've replaced all the Atmega chips in our products
with the STM32F0 series chips for lower-end requirements and with STM32F4
series for higher end stuff, because they have more grunt and generally have
more peripherals, and are similar prices.

~~~
elsjaako
How many MCUs have the same strong, libre toolchain?

~~~
nascentmind
Free GCC tool chains are present for the TI MSP430, TI Tiva Series C (Cortex
M4) and also TI Hercules (Cortex M3) series. Apart from that I have tried
STM32F4 series with GCC tool chains.

I have personally developed Bluetooth stack using the GCC tools for the MSP430
using the CC246x Bluetooth modules and it was a blast.

So you have a lot of options with free tool chains. I personally use only free
toolchains on linux. It is the best development setup and you have a lot of
options for debugging and tool development.

