Is Zilog still in business?

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Zilog have been drifting somewhat.

They sold off some product lines, and just last week, they are swallowed into IXYS - so I am sure employees are distracted right now! ;)

["February 18, 2010 -- IXYS Corporation (NASDAQ:IXYS) today announced the closing of its acquisition of Zilog, Inc. The closing of the acquisition followed the stockholders meeting of Zilog, Inc. on February 17, 2010, at which the acquisition was approved by the following vote: 12,635,022 shares were voted in favor; 11,565 shares were voted against; and 2,021 abstained. Zilog=92s shares ceased trading at the end of today=92s market session. "]

IXYS are a power-Semi company, so with Zilog's cores, they will be able to offer more complete solutions.

Zilog were claiming to have a Cortex variant in the works, but that may have been pruned.

Zilog's web site, was one of the worst even seen, for a Microcontroller vendor. Clearly no one in 'marketing' asked a designer/engineer, or ever used it themselves.

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I can only imagine that the Cortex would be top priority now. Since they are absorbed in IXYS now, they have much less reason to continue working with their proprietary CPU designs. Just like Cypress is coming out with a CM3 version o their PSOC devices (and soon the power devices) I expect IXYS would be served much better by making power devices with a CM3 core.

Rick

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Wasn't the entire Zilog ARM line and design sold to Maxim including the Cortex design?

Also all ARM microcontrollers are sold by NXP, ST, TI, Atmel, Freescale. Oki, and Samsung. Fabless ARM suppliers don't seem to be able to compete, that's why Luminary was sold so cheap to TI.

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ortex design?

.asp

Oki, and

hy Luminary was

That press release refers to the ARM9 devices, not the Cortex family. I'm not aware that Zilog had bought rights to Cortex designs. But if they have, that would be separate from the ARM9.

Rick

Yes, the ARM9 were external memory, POS specific solutions. The M3 was, of course, for more classic Microcontroller applications.

Here is the M3 press release :

["10 May 2008 ... Zilog, Inc. has signed a license to use the ARM Cortex-M3 processor to develop a family of 32-bit based solutions."]

That's a long time ago now, so it may have died internally...

- and now the Cortex-M0 is ramping.. (from NXP (to 32KF) and Nuvoton (to 128KF) and others)

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Cortex

Oki, and

Luminary

Zilog wasn't truthful about the terms of the sale. It was first announced that Zilog only sold their ARM9 POS devices to Maxim. But it later turned out that Maxim had really bought all the rights to all ARM9 designs, including the general purpose ARM9 mcus.

It also could turn out that Maxim bought the Zilog Cortex design, too? Maxim really had Zilog over a barrel and I know that Maxim squeezed the living hell out of Billerbeck to get as much as they can.

Maybe if Zilog's management wasn't so incompetant, they wouldn't have crashed the company the way they did.

the

Do you mean this time or over the last 30 years?

the

Past 5 or 6 years. Which CEO said "we are getting out of the microcontroller buisness"? And I can't remember when they last introduced a new 8bit part. .

crashed the

buisness"?

Someone should write a book about Zilog. The Z80 was a remarkable part and, along with it's peripheral chips, highly successful. After they failed to deliver the Z800, I pretty much gave them up. I'd like to know how it comes about that a company can produce an excellent product line then fail 100% to follow through.

crashed the

ntroller buisness"?

I don't remember all the terminology, but I thought they did come out with a 16 bit CPU. It was on the 32 bit machine they threw in the towel. I remember a quote by the chief architect who had also designed the Z80 basically by hand... after designing the 16 bit CPU with random logic, something about never doing it again. That was the days before VHDL and Verilog and every gate had to be put on a schematic! But then that was how Seymour Cray designed his super computers.

Rick

ntroller buisness"?

The Z8 was a quite good 8 bit core, it had the advantage of not being as early as the 8051, but Zilog were very late bring flash versions, and they have a lot of very similar variants. Zilog DID buy a good Compiler tools company, but their truly appalling web site would never let new customers know that.

Yes, as an example, Rabbit have spun 3 variants of their core, whilst Zilog only managed a single bug-fix pass of their Z80Acclaim.

Given the truly massive software base the Z80 enjoyed, even now there is a lot of potential for the Z80 still, but again Zilog's web site would not let you know that... [Imagine if they had dropped Turbo Pascal 1.0 in ROM, into a corner of the Z80Acclaim...]

Agreed.

Z280, Z380, Z80000...

I.e., anything with a 'Z' and an '8' in it seemed doomed! (well, the Z8000 actually *did* materialize)

Even the Z180 was actually a Hitachi part (HD64180 and its variants).

Read In search of Stupidity....

Not specifically about Zilog but it is about the Sw /IT /Computing industry and the complete mess some companies made of a sure fire success.

The premise is the top dogs are not the top because they are good but that they made fewer obvious mistakes.

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Another interesting read about this subject is "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore".

That reminds me of a Harold Geneen (one-time boss of ITT) quote that I read once and haven't been able to track down.

Mel.

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Yes Zilog is very much still in business and I am told that there will be a new forum that gives a place for complaints, questions and cool things with Zilog products released in the next week or two. I understand that they were purchased by IXYS, which should help them grow. I don't know why your Future rep is saying "not recommended", especially since if you look at their FTM in February, there is a component focus on Zilog products.

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Like when the Z800 will be released

Hey, it's not easy designing a 100e6 transistor quad core 64 bit processor without using any microcode.

yeah, right. And monkeys will fly out of my butt

Unless IXYS plans to just sell off the patents?

Don't be so totally naiive. Are you new to this business or what??????? In distribution, what corporate says and what sales actually sell are usually two completely different things. That's why my Futre rep steers me towards other mcu vendors. A distributor rep isn't going to sell a product that he CAN'T get sales support for, not when he has a full line card that includes Freescale, Microchip, NEC, NXP, ST Micro, and Cypress

Freescale, Microchip, each have huge direct sales networks of about 35 people for USA/Canada. Zilog hasn't answer the phone in a year and is down to 5 direct salesmen for all of US and Canada. That's one saleman for every ten states. And IXYS salesmen are completely untrained in mcus. Don't expect a salesman that only knows how to sell MOSFET drivers to talk to you about mcus and DMA transfer speeds.