Excellent article, however it misses the mark by a bit. Freescale was created with the spinoff of the Semicondutor Product Sector of Motorola. Motorola pretty much dissolved a few years after the founder's grandson took over as CEO (first generation creates, second generation operates, third generation destroys). The grandson - Chris Galvin's last job was selling off all the individual pieces of Motorola's various business that he so royally screwed up.
Motorola was famous in the computer processor area because of the Motorola 6800 and 68000 line of processors used in the Apple Macintosh PC systems. Apple has since migrated to use Intel processors and is now moving to use its own processor design (based or the ARM design). Motorola was also the prime creator of the Iridium communications satellite system. Great idea, but lousy business model and missed its market (hand held satellite phones). Motorola also created Teledesic (Internet in Space), but it was another management abortion that Motorola screwed up. Elon Musk's StarLink satellite system (Internet in Space) picked up the concept and is now including the StarLink satellite communications interface into his new venture Tesla SmartPhones (set to compete with Apple iPhone system), providing both communications and high speed internet into a regular smartphone (thus providing a way to bypass the landbased cellular tower systems - 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and the new 6G which is coming to compete). [Note that Motorola also designed the first Ethernet switch and router and decided that it had no future (did not patent the idea) - until Cisco (Stanford University professors) designed a similar device and took over computer networking. He also passed on the first PDA - the tablet that Apple went on to dominate before they created the smartphone. Another set of fuck ups that grandson screwed the pooch on. He was also famous for keeping Motorola cellphones analog and not going to digital - wanted to preserve Motorola's cash cow at the time.]
Anyway, the KL-03 is a SOC (System on a Chip) device used in low power (battery based) applications - handheld and mobile devices - like a smartphone, etc. There is nothing really special about the KL-03. It's going to be used in a lot of military system due to the way that it is able to handle both analog and digital device interfaces and operate in a low power environment. There are no real secrets in the hardware. The real military secrets would be in the software running on the SOC device.
The real value proposition with this SOC is that it uses the compute core from ARM. ARM (the company) is the key to this SOC device and is the core to essentially all of the smartphone devices. ARM (the company) was recently purchased by Nvidia the graphics processor company - used in computer game graphics, and as the high powered compute core for very high speed computers and AI (artificial intelligence) systems. Since all the cloud computing system are now so power hungry, the industry is switching over to ARM designs across the board to bring down the overall power consumption around the world. Thus, ARM is essentially a trillion dollar company with its low power focus.
Getting back to the missing engineers, they were more production engineers, who specialize in the optimization of the semiconductor chip fabrication process (this is where the money is made in semiconductors - increasing the chip yield from a single wafer). The actual design of the SOC chip - the semiconductor chip itself was designed in Austin Texas - where Freescale has both their headquarters and principal design center. The article included a statement that their names were not found on the device design patent. But they held patents. If you look up their names, I think you will find them on process optimization patents. If I remember correctly, in some later stories on the topic - that was the case.
So, overall - a good story, but when you unpeel it to the core, it does not really play out.
Dang you are really up on this technology. You write very well so a layman can understand. Thanks for posting, much appreciated.
I agree - excellent explanation.
"Freescale’s shareholders include the Carlyle Group of private equity investors whose past advisers have included ex-US president George Bush Sr and former British Prime Minister John Major. Carlyle’s previous heavyweight clients include the Saudi Binladin Group, the construction firm owned by the family of Osama bin Laden."
Joe Biden also spends thanksgiving each year at Carlyle's jewish owner's house. Whatever the truth of this story, you can bet jew rothschild is very tight friends with jew owner of the carlyle group (forget his name), and it's no surprise they're both so tight with the democrats (they own them) and do so much business in china (jews and communism are intertwined). They are without a spec of doubt traitors to America and enemies of all white peoples across the world.
This guy ioios
Lots of information here - Thanks.
Thanks for the insight
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