The Death of ST Ericsson
I just read from the SemiWiki blog that the mobile platform group of STE is going to be shut down. This is sad. During the hey-dey of feature phones, when Sony-Ericsson and Nokia ruled the roost, STE used to be the go to chip designers. They were the creme-de-la-creme, because of their rich history. The historical perspective, reproduced below from the semiwiki article, itself, can give you an idea of the technological expertise or heritage or lineage of the group.
Nokia originally had an internal semiconductor design group and in 2007 they decided to get out of doing their own chip design and relying on Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics. This included transferring most of their chip designers to ST.
Then NXP, the old Philips Semiconductors, had a mobile design group, many of which were the old VLSI Technology engineers in Sophia Antipolis. They merged this group into ST but retained an ownership share, although later ST bought out this remaining share. Next Ericsson had an internal group called Ericsson Mobile Platforms (EMP). Its business plan was to create IP (software, silicon IP etc) to license to people who wanted to get into mobile, especially in upcoming markets like China.
The final step in the creation of ST-Ericsson happened 4 years ago when Ericsson set up a joint-venture with ST and merged the ST design group along with the EMP group.
Read the original semi-wiki article
here
.