Freescale Acquires CommASIC

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 21 -- Freescale Semiconductor, a manufacturer of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets, has acquired CommASIC, a fabless semiconductor company based in San Diego. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2001, CommASIC is a privately-held company and has 30 employees. Freescale says these employees will staff its newly formed San Diego Design Center, which will work in concert with other Freescale design centers. CommASIC provides modem processing multimode technologies, including orthogonal frequency division multiplexing- (OFDM) based solutions, such as Wi-Fi-certified 802.11 a/b/g, used in a variety of mobile and consumer devices.

"This acquisition gives Freescale a base architecture and system expertise that can be leveraged across any OFDM-based technology such as wireless LAN, WiMax and digital video broadcast," said Sumit Sadana, Freescale's senior vice president, strategy and business development. "CommASIC's flexible, programmable, ultralow power baseband architecture will complement Freescale's portfolio of offerings."

According to the 2005 ABI Research Wi-Fi forecast, an estimated 350 million devices will have embedded Wi-Fi by 2010. Freescale says it plans to offer integrated Wi-Fi technology for OEMs to use in next-generation products such as cellular and VoIP handsets, personal multimedia players, computer peripherals and other consumer devices.
For more information, visit: www.freescale.com