MCU market consolidation

5/26/2009 10:56 AM EDT

NEC and Renesas are merging, TI has acquired Luminary Micro, and Microchip almost purchased Atmel. Is more consolidation coming in the microcontroller area? It would be hard to believe that this recession will not provide buying opportunities for the cash rich companies, or mergers of convenience will be sought as world-wide sales fall. But the MCU market is unique in that there are many different application areas that all need some sort of microcontroller device.  And because many of these applications are power and price sensitive, the system developers will only want what peripherals and memory they really need-- there will still be offerings with different features from many companies.

So there is a chance that more consolidation will happen, but it will probably not come down to just two companies providing devices as we see in the desktop PC processor market (Intel and AMD). The applications are just too varied.

For reference, here is a list of companies that currently provide microcontrollers whether they are referred to as MCUs, System on Chips (SoCs), or digital signal controllers (DSCs). It's still a very long list of large and small vendors.  Will this many companies survive? We'll have to wait and see.

Please let me know if I've left anyone off this list (I'm sure I have), or you have some other thoughts on the current microcontroller market.

• Renesas
• Microchip
• Freescale
• Texas Instruments
• Atmel
• Infineon
• Fujitsu
• Samsung
• ST Microelectronics
• NXP
• NEC
• Toshiba
• Analog Devices Inc.
• Cypress
• Luminary Micro
• Maxim
• Marvell
• Rabbit
• Zilog
• Silicon Labs
• Cyan
• Jennic
• Energy Micro
• Oki
• Holtek Semiconductor
• Sonix
• Epson
• Innovasic Semiconductor