Freescale
 |
|
| Public | |
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Fate | Acquired by NXP Semiconductors |
| Founded | Spin-off from Motorola in 2004 |
| Defunct | December 7, 2015 |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas, USA |
|
Key people
|
Gregg Lowe (CEO) Geoff Lees (Microcontrollers) |
| Revenue |
 $4.634 billion USD (2014)
|
|
$765 million USD (2014)
|
|
|
$251 million USD (2014)
|
|
|
Number of employees
|
17,300 (2013) |
| Website | www |
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas with design, research and development, manufacturing and sales operations in more than 75 locations in 19 countries. The company employed 17,000 people worldwide.
On December 7, 2015, NXP Semiconductors completed its merger with Freescale for about $11.8 billion in cash and stock. Freescale shareholders received $6.25 billion in cash and 0.3521 of an NXP share for each Freescale common share. Including the assumption of Freescale's debt, the purchase price is about $16.7 billion.
Freescale was one of the first semiconductor companies in the world, having started as a division of Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona in 1948 and then becoming autonomous by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. In 1955, a Motorola transistor for car radios was the world's first commercial high-power transistor. It was also Motorola's first mass-produced semiconductor device.
In the 1960s, one of the U.S. space program's goals was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. In 1968, NASA began manned Apollo flights that led to the first lunar landing in July 1969. The Apollo program was particularly significant for hundreds of employees involved in designing, testing and producing its electronics. The division of Motorola which would eventually become Freescale Semiconductor, supplied thousands of semiconductor devices, ground-based tracking and checkout equipment, and 12 on-board tracking and communications units. An "up-data link" in the Apollo's command module received signals from Earth to relay to other on-board systems. A transponder received and transmitted voice and television signals and scientific data.
Also that year, Motorola's technologies were used to introduce the first two-way mobile radio with a fully transistorized power supply and receiver for cars.
Motorola has continued its growth in the networking and communications sector in later years, providing the tools behind the radio transponder, and going on to develop the first prototype of the first analog mobile phone in 1973.
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Wikipedia