Freescale Semiconductor CEO Rich Beyer says an IPO is the next logical step for the broad-based chip manufacturer.
With an eye on the market and recent semiconductor IPO activity – namely Alpha and Omega Semiconductor and NXP’s plans to float in the near future – Beyer says an initial public offering (IPO) of Freescale shares is now being discussed.
“It is currently a topic of discussion within the company and is the most logical step,” Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale told EW.
Like NXP, Freescale is owned by private equity investors. The Blackstone-led consortium bought the Motorola spin-out for $17.6bn in 2006.
And like most chip suppliers, Freescale is seeing increases demand for chips in the market and it has just completed a strong Q1 of revenue growth.
“All businesses are growing and design-in momentum is strong,” said Beyer.
“We’ve had four straight quarters of revenue growth,” said Beyer.
The prospects for the rest of the year looks good. “The market is heading toward 20% plus revenues growth this year,” said Beyer.
Beyer also said that Freescale’s fab utilisation is currently running at 66%, “that’s up from 60% in the last quarter”, he said.
Beyer pointed to the automotive and networking markets as particularly strong. “In Europe, the automotive market is looking better than expected,” said Beyer.
“The networking market is also coming back to life,” he added.
In the consumer market, Beyer also said that Freescale was working with a number of OEMs developing e-readers.
The company also showed its first reference design for a netbook in January. “That market is starting to gain momentum,” said Beyer.
Freescale has developed a $10 applications processor and reference design for e-readers, developed with E-Ink, which is aimed to drive the cost of e-readers down to $150 this year.
At the moment an Amazon Kindle e-reader costs between $250 and $500 while Sony's e-readers cost $200 - $400.
Freescale's chip, the i.MX508, uses an 800MHz ARM Cortex A8 and a controller fgrom E-Ink. It supports panel resolutions up to 2048 x1536 pixels at 106Hz.