Freescale has agreed to purchase Mindspeed’s communications processor unit for an undisclosed amount. Mindspeed was acquired by MACOM last year, and at the time the RF and microwave specialist said that it would try to sell Mindspeed’s Comcerto communications processor business, or wind it down. Now it has found a buyer in Freescale, a leading supplier of communications processors for networking equipment.
“This acquisition will extend Freescale’s reach into gateways and network-attached storage at a time when both are on the cusp of advances in ease-of-use, cloud technology, home automation and security, and the Internet of Things (IoT),” said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager for Freescale’s Digital Networking product group. In addition to Mindspeed’s ARM-based embedded processors and associated software, Freescale will bring on a number of employees from the Comcerto team.
Comcerto targets wireless access points with its embedded processors, and offers solutions for products that serve enterprises, small businesses, and home users. The company’s flagship is the Comcerto 2000 SoC, which combines two 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs with packet engines and communications accelerators.
Mindspeed says its Comcerto 2000 supports 802.11ac and enables enterprise customers to separate Wi-Fi connectivity from other applications like policy and authentication. Comcerto has plenty of competition in this space: Broadcom and Qualcomm also have dual-core ARM-based solutions for Wi-Fi access points.
