Rising from the ashes
1 min read
Four years ago, Spansion was figuratively left for dead by the electronics industry. The company was on its uppers and took the only option left to it – filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to hold off the creditors. And it was the last option – ceo John Kispert had been offered a substantial bonus if he could find a buyer for the flash memory pioneer.
It was the lowest point on what has been a 20 year journey for the company. It can trace its origins back to 1993, when Fujitsu and AMD formed the imaginatively named Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor to develop flash memory technology. The venture was spun off by the two founders in 2003 and renamed FASL, with the Spansion brand taking over shortly after.
Pretty quickly, Spansion was in trouble – a string of annual losses was compounded by a declining market as the industry started to tank in 2008. One of the actions was to appoint a chief restructuring officer. The move seems to have done the trick: sales in 2012 were just shy of $1billion and the company made a modest profit.
Now, it's just acquired Fujitsu's mcu and analogue technology. So what's the attraction? Spansion is looking to blend memory, mcu and on chip analogue elements to create SoCs for a range of sectors. It claims the move – a $110m – will increase the market available to it by a factor of five.
It's an interesting move: Fujitsu is well established in the automotive business, is a licensee of ARM cores and has strong power and analogue technology. Now the challenge is to develop those SoCs which Spansion envisages.
