Arun! Your mastermind is behind this, isn't it?
Given the fact my last question for Rayfield at MWC was "So what are the chances of seeing a bunch of joint smartphone design wins with Icera?" (paraphased), and that we had a short discussion on Icera at the press dinner before that (where I told him their architecture was at least as efficient as the SDR arch from CEVA or Coresonic) along with an argument on whether it was viable to focus exclusively on the high-end... (before even considering all our previous short discussions about Icera in the last 2.5 years)
You could say I played a very very small part. But more seriously, the single most important factor by far was the fact that Icera's revenues went down noticeably starting in around March as the USB dongle market went down (see:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/267...sses-q1-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript). I'm sure NVIDIA (and TI, and others) must have talked with Icera about this for many months (see:
http://www.informilo.com/20101207/building-europes-next-billion-dollar-businesses-iceras-story-327) but I suspect the price was just too high for anyone to accept.
When that unexpected revenue shortfall happened, Icera would no longer have been in a position to get to break-even & IPO without a fair bit more VC funding, which would have been very hard to get at this point. And so they probably reduced their asking price significantly (if I had to guess, I'd say they wanted upwards of $500M at the very least before, maybe as high as $750M, or perhaps they considered becoming a joint venture with Samsung like Infineon was proposed last year). It wouldn't have made any sense for NV to have bought them at $600M, but at $350M it's suddenly very appealing. And I can't say I'm unhappy about this, it will be interesting to see what happens now (even if it'd have been nice for the semiconductor start-up market if they had fetched a higher price).
loekf said:
It's a necessary move from Nvidia. If you want to play a role in connected devices (tablets etc) or smartphones you need a base-band supplier. Some customers prefer a "kit".
Exactly. But what you're missing (along with most other people) is that you can build a kit even if you're two separate companies. This acquisition won't change much on that front - it's all about making more money via bundling (short-term) and roadmap synergies (long-term) along with making sure Icera doesn't fall into enemy hands (ala Intel buying Infineon).
loekf said:
Now.. what is Nvidia going to do with Bluetooth, NFC, WiFI, GPS etc ? CSR is around the corner in the UK I assume ?
CSR and Broadcom are both going to continue providing very strong solutions on the open market for a very long time. And anyway, the process tech lacks behind too much so there's little opportunity for integration unlike basebands (unless you'd integrate with the cellular RF which might be interesting). And there are quite a few target applications where Tegra wouldn't fit in, so the bundling synergies aren't optimal either.
Developing 60GHz (WiGig) in-house would be interesting and potentially a good fit for Icera's architecture, but I'm skeptical it's worth the time/resources/risk given the synergies and market potential aren't quite as good as with cellular. So at this point, I'd say they should focus on what they know, and try to expand into that market instead of wasting time and effort elsewhere.
loekf said:
"Vell, [strike]Zaphod's[/strike] Arun's just zis guy, you know?"