M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings Inc. (Lowell, Mass.), a supplier of RF, microwave and millimeter wave products, has announced the sale of its Comcerto communication processor business to Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas) for an undisclosed sum of money.
Macom bought Mindspeed in a deal worth about $272 million late in 2013 but it was understood at the time that it would be selling the Comcerto business on. Macom's main interest was in optical networking technology and high-speed silicon-germanium circuit design capability to help it move into 100G networking and into data centers and metro markets.
The communication processor family being sold on includes Comcerto 100, 1000 and 2000 embedded multicore products. Meanwhile Macom plans to retain the related Comcerto Voice over IP processor business as a long-term holding. The Comcerto 2000 SoC is supported by a software library and combines two 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs with packet engines and communications accelerators. As part of the agreement, key members of the business will join Freescale.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2014.
"This divesture is consistent with the vision that we outlined in December to focus our efforts on Mindspeed's complementary high performance analog business and follows our successful sale of Mindspeed's wireless infrastructure business to Intel in February," said John Croteau, CEO of Macom, in a statement.
Intel Corp. acquired the assets of Mindspeed Technologies Inc.'s wireless infrastructure business unit for roughly $12 million in February 2014.
"This acquisition will extend Freescale’s reach into gateways and network-attached storage at a time when both are on the cusp of advances in ease-of-use, cloud technology, home automation and security, and the Internet of Things," said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager for Freescale’s Digital Networking product group, in a separate statement.
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