Mayer Describes Embedded Future at Freescale Technology Forum

Describing his company’s 2006 acquisition in a leveraged buyout as an advantage, Freescale Semiconductor CEO Michel Mayer kicked off the third annual Freescale Technology Forum this week.

Speaking to a crowd of about 2,000 engineers at the forum’s keynote speech, Mayer said that the company’s $17.6 billion acquisition by a private equity consortium last year will provide the semiconductor giant with greater long-term focus, which is particularly important as the industry reaches maturity.

“Private equity investors are generally in it for the long term and succeed only when their companies succeed,” Mayer told the audience. “Such clear ownership and ‘skin in the game’ facilitates faster decision making.”

Mayer said that the leveraged buyout, believed to be the largest technology LBO in history, will free Freescale from the short-term demands of Wall Street, which are typically faced by publicly held companies.

Mayer added that the company sees its future being formed by three key market trends: the global movement toward “green” engineering; the needs of aging an aging population and the impact of broadband.

“As these powerful trends are converging around us, there is another form of convergence taking place,” he said. “Embedded intelligence, networking, and wireless technologies are merging in everything from transportation to consumer electronics.”

At the keynote, Freescale showed its commitment to embedded technologies by demonstrating and discussing emerging products, such as a low-cost myoelectric prosthetic hand and a small autonomous vehicle.

At one point, Mayer and Freescale engineer Michelle Kelsey even demonstrated what is believed to be the world’s first “intelligent basketball.” The ball, which incorporates a three-axis accelerometer, Zigbee transceiver and eight-bit Freescale microcontroller, represented a cooperative product development effort between Freescale and sporting goods manufacturer Spalding. Mayer demonstrated the ball by calling an engineer from the audience to shoot it at an on-stage basketball rim. The electronics in the ball then displayed the velocity and shot angle on a laptop computer wired to an on-stage screen.

Also at the show, Freescale rolled out numerous technologies for embedded applications, including: a radio frequency control platform for entertainment devices such as TV remotes and a 0.13-µm chip that combines power, analog and digital electronics.

	Mayer: “Clear ownership ... facilitates faster decision-making.”