Motorola Inc will be part of a joint venture with German chipmaker Infineon and Agere Systems Inc to develop and market chip technology used in mobile phones and consumer electronics, the companies announced Tuesday.
The new company, called StarCore, will develop and license the architecture for use in digital signal processor chips that are used in products ranging from cell phones to CD players. It won't make the chips, but will license the technology to chip companies or device makers, the companies said in a joint statement.
The venture will consolidate a highly fragmented industry, said StarCore's chief executive, Thomas Lantzsch, who was a vice president with Schaumburg-based Motorola.
"The true beneficiaries will be consumers and customers," Lantzsch said. The venture will have the funding, technology, talent and customer base "to change the face of the DSP industry," he added.
StarCore will be up and running by late summer with about 100 employees split between the headquarters in Austin, Texas, and an office in Tel Aviv.
Digital signal processor chips change electronic signals, for instance, transforming the acoustic signal produced by a phone user speaking into a microphone into a digital signal for transmission over the air. Designers of silicon chips use DSP cores as building blocks.
The joint venture enables the companies to share the costs of developing the chip technology and to offer it to anyone who wants to buy it rather than simply developing the devices for use in-house.
Lantzsch said the central goal of StarCore is to develop and market DSP technologies that can be easily and cost-effectively adapted for widespread use in new communications and consumer products. StarCore will market its products to semiconductor manufacturers and communications equipment providers worldwide.
The new company builds on the StarCore Joint Design Center founded in 1998 to develop chip technology for Agere and Motorola only, the companies said.
Agere makes semiconductors and components for wireless and fixed-line communications networks.
In related news, Toshiba Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. said they also will jointly develop chips that will boost the performance of electronics, ranging from telecommunications equipment to digital consumer products, to cut costs.
The alliance between Toshiba, the world's second-largest chipmaker, and Fujitsu, the world's third-largest maker of memory chips for mobile phones, will improve the efficiency of chips that will help computer servers, mobile phones and telecommunications networks link to the Internet at high speeds, the companies said in a statement.
Japanese chipmakers are teaming up to pare spending after posting record losses last fiscal year. Sales plunged when demand for personal computers slumped for the first time since 1985.
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