04 June 2009
Intel buys Wind River, but is it good news for the sector?
Acquisitions are the name of the game in the electronics industry – and often, it's the bigger the better. Shading into the latter category is Intel's acquisition of Wind River for $884million.
The other great question when these acquisitions happen is 'why?'. The electronics industry is strewn with the wreckage of takeovers that simply didn't work.
In this case, the reasoning seems clear: Intel wants to wean itself away from dependence on the pc market and the embedded systems sector is a prime candidate for its attention. But is it good news for the sector?
It's a route the processor giant has been following for a while now, with a major move being the introduction of the Atom processor. Atom is everything that Intel's pc processors aren't: suitable for embedding, low power and so on.
And the embedded market is an attractive target for Intel. While it's a market in which it doesn't have a real presence, it's making strong efforts to get a serious toe hold. At Embedded World earlier this year, it was obvious that its marketing department had been working overtime to get the Atom name almost everywhere you looked.
But it's one thing having a processor; embedded systems need tools and Intel's acquisition of Wind River not only gives it strong tools expertise, but also brings application specific expertise in end user sectors ranging across the industrial market from aerospace to automation to medical systems.
However, the move is more than likely to take an independent tools provider out of the market. If you're using Wind River tools for, say, a Freescale based system, how much longer will you be able to rely on that support? And will the remaining independent tools developers be able to give you what you want?
Author
Graham Pitcher
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.intel.com
http://www.windriver.com
Companies
Intel Corporation (UK) Ltd
Wind River UK Sales
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