And slowly the silicon fen gets sold for real estate
*the one with marsh reviewer monthly in the pocket
A British chip-design company has sold its mobile and GPS location-finding tech wing to Samsung for $310 million (£198m). Cambridge-based biz CSR sealed the deal today, according to a regulatory notice from the London Stock Exchange. It will shift 310 employees, and an attractive sheaf of patents, over to the South Korean …
How much? Zero if they're not also shareholders. That's how a company works.
But at least they shouldn't be at risk of "right-sizing". If you buy a company for its intellectual assets, you'd have to be pretty moronic to fire those assets.
OK, I'll bite: CSR is not fabless in the sense that it meant in the 1990s when ARM was new: it does not license its designs. CSR pays TSMC to make chips that CSR owns and sells; CSR does not own a fab itself.
But these days young people call that fabless too, because of the not-owning-fab aspect.
I did send a correction note in (to El Reg) about this, but it looks like it hasn't been actioned, the wording is still the same (and incorrect). CSR makes - or has made, up until now - its living by selling actual physical chips, not by selling IP for others to incorporate into their chips.