Freescale: The next big analog player?

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Ohr also has another viewpoint about Freescale. ''I personally don't see any more acquisitions for Freescale,'' Ohr said. ''I think they spent a lot of available money with the acquisition of Sigmatel, but, off course, further acquisitions are not out of the question. More likely, they may be raiding competitors for management talent.''

Freescale recently said it has agreed to purchase SigmaTel Inc. for about $110 million to secure complementary analog ICs as it diversifies sales into the digital and consumer electronics markets.

Stiil, Freescale has a long ways to go in analog. ''They've already hired an analog guy--Arman Naghavi, out of Intersil, in fact, over a year ago--to help formulate an analog product strategy. Naghavi sees power management as a hot button,'' Ohr said. ''As an aside, I'd be curious if he gets along with Rich Beyer.''

Also on the product front, ''there are an awful lot of analog parts--[such as] voltage regulators, for example--that are reported as 'application-specific standard products' that could easily be converted to catalog items,'' he said. ''They make, for example, a high-current DC-DC converter that pairs with some of their Power PC processors.''

But overall, he added, ''Freescale really does have a lot of analog talent in-house.''