Interesting ADC News

Doug Hall

It appears that Analog Devices is buying Linear Technology, maker of the ADCs used in many direct sampling SDRs including the Flex. Both companies have fairly broad portfolios, but LTC seems to have captured a greater market share in the SDR space. Linear Tech stock was up almost 30% following the announcement.

This seems to be a trend in recent years - semiconductor companies buying rivals in order to better compete. A few years ago TI bought National Semiconductor, and earlier this year Microchip (maker of the PIC micro) bought out Atmel (maker of the AVR used in the Arduino) and Avago bought Broadcom. I read somewhere that semiconductor mergers were at an all-tme high in 2015. There were rumors earlier this year about Xilinx (makers of the FPGAs used in many SDRs) being acquired as well.

I don't think the ADI-LTC merger is a bad thing, just interesting.
73,
Doug K4DSP

EA4GLI

"Linear Tech stock was up almost 30% following the announcement." I could have used that on my portfolio! LOL
Thanks for the info.

Scott N8UMW

Intel now owns Altera who's chips are also used in some great sdr rigs. Makes me wonder how long it will be until two companies buy up all the others.

k3Tim

Softbank (Japan)  recently bought Arm Holdings (UK).  Arm-H holds the IP for Arm CPUs that are used by the train load throughout the world. All smartphones / IoT / etc have ARM based processors.
Dollars to donuts there is an ARM cpu in the 6k / Maestro someplace.

Tim

AA0KM

The FLEX-6000 Signature Series incorporates a Xilinx® Virtex®-6 field programmable gate array (FPGA) that performs all digital up and down conversion for spectral analysis.  The FPGA works in tandem with a Texas Instruments™ DaVinci™  Digital Media Processor that includes a 1.4 GHz (1.2 GHz on FLEX-6500) ARM Cortex™-A8 CPU with NEON™ floating point coprocessor.  It also includes a 1.2 GHz (1.0 GHz on FLEX-6500), 32-bit floating point DSP coprocessor.  The CPU incorporates 512 MB of 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, 1 Gbps Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 communication ports.

Scott N8UMW

What's in the 6300?