It's on: Microchip vs. Atmel

Looks like there's a battle brewing in the embedded processor market. Microchip, which makes the PIC processor line that was the main microprocessor of the last generation, has made a bid to buy Atmel, which makes the AVR chip line that is the hot architecture of this generation (it's the family that our Arduino Atmega168 processor is part of). The bid is for $2.3 billion, but Atmel has rejected it and says it's not looking to sell. Is this a defensive move by Microchip, afraid that it will lose the crown to the fast-rising Atmel? The Makezine has more.

3 Comments

Comment by Jan P on October 2, 2008 at 1:57pm: Guess that makes me last generation trying to learn these new fangled AVR chips. Kind of hope it doesn't happen. Jan

Comment by Jack Crossfire on October 7, 2008 at 1:46pm: The trend with these mergers has always been movement to Silicon Valley, most notably HP shutting down Compaq & EDS in the outer states & outsourcing that work to India.

The big question: will Microchip lay off its Arizona employees & move to Silicon Valley or lay off Atmel's Silicon Valley employees & stay in Arizona.

Comment by Jack Crossfire on November 12, 2008 at 10:40pm: This is becoming another story of executive greed. Atmel burning tons of money, employees losing their jobs, while royalty tries to milk Microchip for all it's worth & refuses bid after bid. Like Yahoo, they'll go bankrupt in the name of the $50 billion executive bonus.

In an age where any fixed quantity of raw materials can be anything for the same cost, the real war seems to be between 8 bit & 32 bit. There's probably some kind of hideous patent on AVR & after the bankruptcy it'll probably live on in some hobbyist implemented emulator, running on 32 bit microcontrollers, followed by a complete disappearance of PIC years later.

It's on: Microchip vs. Atmel

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