WTRS Executive Interview

Interview with Jason Ellis, Director of Business Development & Marketing, Staccato Communications.

Jan 30, 2006

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been in UWB since 2000. Started at General Atomics, started off looking primarily at impulse radio which is what UWB was back in 2000. In the process the industry secured people [who] figured out exactly what they would do with this UWB thing. To be honest with you, it has changed dramatically. Originally it was a technology based on impulse radio and people did not know how to use it; and for that matter, people did not know how to build it because the original people involved in UWB were all systems guys and not chip guys. My involvement with UWB has been from an engineering perspective, from wireless communications and network architecture. I’ve got several patents in both architecture for communications and wireless USB, and I’ve been actively involved in all the standard activities and quite a bit in regulatory and even part of the ITU. I was the second employee in UWB over at GA and when I moved in late 2003, I joined Roberto and his team having had the opportunity to work with them before when I was at General Atomics and they were consultants. Now I’m direct Developing and Marketing at Staccato, still doing some standard activities but really managing partnerships and doing corporate marketing.

2. Who is Staccato?
Fantasma Networks was a company that spun out of Interval Research, Interval being based in the Bay Area and funded by Paul Allen. Interval Research spun out Fantasma in 1998. Fantasma secured 1st round funding and went out of business in 2001. A lot of the employees were recruited by General Atomics which is how I ended up getting to know Roberto and all of his team. But the assets, which weren’t that many, became a fire sale, and PulseLink’s John Santoff purchased the assets. Those assets were primarily computers, lab equipment and some intellectual property. But a lot of that intellectual property was based on a very old technology, impulse radio, and actually that radio architecture was using pulse amplitude modulation. I don’t even think PulseLink is using that at this time. So Roberto, Larry Taylor, and Mark Bowles, and Dan Meecham started off as a consulting entity doing work for General Atomics. They intended to start up a low bit rate company for UWB, but being that there is so much interest in high data rate, the company could only secure funds by going to high data rate products. And since it was already looking like there was already a bit of competition, what Staccato recognized was no one was doing single chip in CMOS. If you look at the history of most transceiver products including WiFi, Bluetooth and Ethernet, none of those markets actually became active from an adoption standpoint until the price point dropped significantly. For many of them it [became active] when they got below $25, below $10, and it really took off when it got sub $10 and continued to mature as it drove the price down further. The only way to accomplish that, as is evident by our own analysis and many people’s analysis but also based upon just observation, is when it gets to single chip CMOS. Staccato was funded in April of 2003 to pursue a single chip CMOS strategy. I joined Staccato just a few months after they got funding and the original scope or purpose of Staccato was to a single chip integrated RF based band in CMOS. Immediately when we took on new employees, this coincides with where the IEEE was at that point. Oh, by the way, I was also IEEE 15.3a technical editor when it was in its study group phase. I was extremely involved in the IEEE, as were a few of my colleagues. Roberto and I went to the first 15.3a meetings. And actually there’s something worth pointing out there in a moment, how the 15.3a arose from 802.15.3, but I’ll come back to that. It was when Dan Meecham, our VP of engineering, and a few other people came to the scene and they saw that we were doing UWB impulse radio. Maybe it’s not the same impulse radio that had been done, but even the more innovative impulse radio being proposed by Freescale and also being proposed as multi-bands, we called it pulse multi-band. They looked at that and said you guys will never be able to implement that in a low cost silicon solution, let alone in CMOS. And at the same time Texas Instruments had a great amount of resource through their UWB acquisition, also recognized that you really want to do this using OFDM. Staccato came to that realization and early on started to support not only multi-band, which we had supported originally. Roberto, myself, a gentleman from Intel, and a gentleman from Alereon are the four co-founders of what became the multi-band coalition. Then we were able to grow that into what became the MBOA which became the MBOA SIG, which finally became WiMedia. All the silicon guys came to the same conclusion and said you need to do something differently because this other stuff is all very nice but you’re only looking at it from a strictly communications perspective. That’s when the OFDM started to gain momentum. There are two fundamental reasons why OFDM was able to garner a tremendous amount of support within the IEEE so quickly. One was the ability to capture energy with a very efficient receiver. One of the problems with impulse radio is how much dwell time you needed in order to capture energy or, for that matter, how complicated you wanted to make your receiver. Given the constraints of low cost, and also given some of the new requirements that were coming in for the IEEE about being 480 MB/sec for wireless USB, there was a real need to move a lot of data. There were 23-26 proposals, I think 23 real ones in the end, maybe 25. Of those, the majority of them, including SONY, who originally advocated a single band radio architecture, ended up supporting a multi-band OFDM architecture. In June of 2003 the MBOA was formed and the proposal came forward with a merger of 16 different proposals. They were very distinct, including multi-band, pulse multi-band, multi-band OFDM and single band architecture. The other key benefit why people were supporting the multi-band approach was that they liked the fact that it was OFDM, which means that it was very digital in nature, which is very conducive to implementing in low cost semiconductor processes including CMOS. Some of the other radio architectures require a substantial RF portion of the chip. Here, by having it digital, you really get the benefit of Moore’s Law being able to scale with process technology. The analog sections don’t typically change a whole lot with Moore’s Law but digital certainly does. The other piece of it is the regulatory situations with a lot of early engagements outside of the US. It was evident that in Japan there were concerns about radio astronomy and being able to protect other native, legacy services or new services. Being able to have a radio that could easily adapt to it’s environment was the right thing to do. In addition, you also get other benefits by being able to control the spectrum, including protecting yourself from interferers. So that’s kind of the background of that and where Staccato ended up going.
At that point there was a consortium of 7 companies in Japan, not all Japanese, but they had consolidated in Japan. They also included Phillips and Samsung. They were consumer electronic companies that recognized that yes, it’s nice to have wireless 1394 and yes, it’s nice to have wireless USB. They really saw UWB as something amazing and they wanted to have a MAC architecture that would really allow for new types of device connectivity, not just simply cable replacement. And so as such, they started working on their own MAC in lieu of 802.15.3 MAC which the 15.3a would have been forced to use, and is actually today what Freescale still uses. So in hopes of bringing that activity into a more structured organization, the MBOA invited those consumer electronic companies to present their problem statements to the group at large, which at that point also included Appairent, which Bob Heile was affiliated with. They presented their statements. There were some proposals that remedied solutions to make the 15.3 MAC work better, but ultimately Sony, Phillips and Intel led a proposal which gained a lot of momentum for a distributive MAC architecture. That folded into the MBOA and that’s where you get your second difference between the IEEE 15.3a which at this point was in a heated debate. Originally the IEEE process started of on a technical note and as a result, the MBOA specification really matured and really benefited from the critique of other people supporting the technology, as well as those that were adamantly against it, including folks from Freescale.
The 802.15.3a MAC was completely different because it was a fundamentally new architecture. Staccato saw the opportunity to influence a new MAC and took it. Where Staccato is today, we now have a series of products which we introduced at CES. We also support all the software that’s required so we really are now a complete solution provider and what we don’t provide ourselves, we have a partner program so depending on what our customer’s interests are, we can provide almost turn-key services. That’s not necessarily what Staccato is about, but through our partnerships, we can make that happen because traditionally a lot of the customers we’re engaged with have never dealt with wireless before. If you look at a hard drive or a digital still camera, there are a couple products that now have wireless. But for the case of a wireless USB hard drive, the hard drive manufacturers have never dealt with wireless before.

3. What types of sales channels are in place today for Staccato and how do you plan to develop them over time?
Our customers are varied - OEMs and ODMs primarily. At this time for our first generation product in order to accelerate the market, reduce risk and really get through the market, we offer our solution complete as a system in package. So that leaves us as providing system in package and that means that ODMs and OEMs are our key customers. Some of the OEMs will do it themselves and some of them have us engage with ODMs. We have a direct sales force with additional offices in Japan and London. We have a number of sales people, inside sales, vice president of worldwide sales, and then we have regional sales. On top of that were bringing on distributors and we have a worldwide agreement with Fujitsu for them to be an authorized sales channel. Worldwide, Fujitsu’s 2000-plus employees and their sales team and engineering support are being trained to represent Staccato’s products. What’s unique about that is Fujitsu is the foundry as well for Staccato. We have a number of very strategic relationships with Fujitsu. As such, our customers are really assured that they’re dealing with a big company if they choose to use Fujitsu as opposed to coming directly through us. It gives us a lot more advantage and a lot more capability than the average fabless company. For a fabless semiconductor company that has no product in production with a history, it’s very difficult to assure the major customers that you have what it takes to deliver. Typically the team you assemble would have a proven record with a previous company, but really beyond that what assurance do they have? Naturally people will question Fujitsu much less because Fujitsu’s got a very good track record and a lot of these companies have already purchased silicon from Fujitsu. One of the reasons we chose to have a channel relationship with Fujitsu is that it really provides an extra level of assurance that we can deliver as promised.

4. Based on your experience with the customer requirements in this space, how do you think end users will adopt these new UWB wireless technologies? What are some of the typical applications you are seeing?
Staccato for over one and a half, if not two, years has been the one strong company aside from Freescale because they were one of the early companies to actually have their sales team out there. Now Staccato being a small company, we were very aggressive. In addition to that we also had conference calls and e-mail discussions with many customers but we had sixty face-to-face meetings every month or more. We really feel we’ve matured with our customers and that in many ways we may have a better perspective on the industry than any one customer in particular, especially if it’s a big company. Sometimes divisions within a big company don’t know what’s going on.
In so doing, we’ve talked a lot about the products and what the needs are. The first thing I’m going to correct you on is your question of “What is a consumer experience, what do they want from a UWB product?” The answer is they don’t want a UWB product. They want a recognizable brand name. The name that so many of them have grown familiar with and have a lot of comfort with is USB. What they specifically like about USB is the fact that it’s plug-and-play, has the software drivers ready to go, and they know exactly what it means. When they look for USB they know about the USB implementers forum; maybe not the forum but they know the logo. In fact if you ask people what the radio is, WiFi or Bluetooth, they wouldn’t know. What they care about is that it works with every device that they have. So they will get more and more exposure to certified wireless USB and that is what they will look for. USB 1.1 transitioned to USB 2.0 pretty well, so far. Now USB 2.0 is transitioning and morphing into certified wireless USB. When certified wireless USB uses the same class of device drivers, the same infrastructure, and a very similar logo, people understand “Oh, its wireless USB - it just gets rid of the cable”. It’s very intuitive to explain that to anyone.
Staccato has already run a number of focus groups which I think my colleague explained to you at CES. The focus groups, within seconds of beginning the session said, “Oh, this is cool, it’s going to do this or it’s going to do that or it’s going to allow new usage models.” Actually even with the recent announcement and excitement of Belkin’s pre-standard product, there’s a huge amount of industry momentum building up around the concept of wireless USB cable replacement. What it’s really focused on is getting rid of a lot of those cables. But the only way it really works is if products from many, many, many different manufacturers are all using the same radio scheme, and that, right there, is why certified wireless USB is important.

5. So, are you paying attention to some of the attempts like the HANA Alliance where they’re trying to do wireless 1394, or is that more of a future activity rather than something you’re looking at today?
Last year I was on the board of directors of the 1394 Trade Association and was very involved with 1394, especially in the wireless working group, to really enable wireless 1394. It was when I was involved that the 1394 Trade Association really started to look at UWB and at that time adopted the WiMedia Alliance and MBOA MAC, and had started a project to define wireless USB over WiMedia. The challenge with 1394 was that there was not enough support by the industry. By industry I mean companies that actually use 1394, not the semiconductor companies, but the actual companies that would use it. There was a light attendance of those companies. I think that a lot of that has to do with Internet Protocol and the DLNA. HANA’s using 1394, but the DLNA, which has gained a lot of industry momentum, may have taken away some of the allure that 1394 had garnered over the years. Specifically, Sony had become a huge advocate in DLNA and, as you know, Sony was a huge advocate of 1394. From the WiMedia’s perspective, and also from the Staccato perspective, we said “if there will be a wireless 1394, we’d like that to happen over a WiMedia radio platform, and to make sure that it is coordinated between wireless USB, Bluetooth, IP and USB.” To this date, I’m not aware of a whole lot of activity going on in the wireless working group. I think that’s unfortunate and I think the lack of activity is happening on a much larger level, not just wireless, but just 1394 in general.

6. Do you think a common signaling mode is possible for UWB? Possibly at specified frequencies?
What WiMedia has created with the involvement of folks from companies that represent Bluetooth, WiFi, 1394, USB, and IP networks, is a master plan that encompasses all the network types. This is why WiMedia developed a convergence layer which is a common radio architecture that includes a set of policies that, for example, govern bandwidth use. If you don’t need to be over the air all the time, then you need to not be over the air all the time. Or, if you’re over the air all the time and another system comes in, and it requires you [to] pull back on the number of reservations you make over the network, then so be it. That’s a good-neighbor policy concept. Right now it’s difficult for me to tell you if there will be support for 1394, Bluetooth, or IP. The thing I can tell you is that the thing that’s gained the most amount of momentum right now, the thing that’s published, the thing that people are introducing products for, is certified wireless USB. That will happen. And that will be a large market. The next thing is, when will Bluetooth happen? Maybe it’s in ’07, but those discussions are happening now. When will IP happen? Maybe sooner, maybe the same time. When will 1394 happen? Right now, I haven’t seen a lot happening there, except for proprietary radios being connected to 1394.
Bluetooth and IP are exciting because there are current discussions going on that say that you use the Bluetooth PAN profile, and therefore IP-based networks are really Bluetooth. So instead of having IP and Bluetooth as separate, if you support the Bluetooth PAN profile with some modifications, you’re actually running IP connectivity. In the end, you could actually have certified wireless USB and this Bluetooth PAN/IP going under the brand name of Bluetooth or next generation Bluetooth, whatever they call it. Then you have a very optimized solution on top of the WiMedia radio, one of them very optimized for host-to-device type connectivity and the other very optimized for peer-to-peer connectivity.
Now, you asked a different question which was looking at a common signaling mode between different radios and I think the answer to that is a couple-fold. First off, the WiMedia radio itself has a base rate mode. That radio operates at 640Mbps per second over the air and it gets coded into about 7 or 8 different data rates ranging from the lowest one which is 53Mbps all the way up to 480Mbps in the current version of the spec. I am already aware that 7+ companies, and many more in development, have actively worked on product in this area. As of today, 3 of those companies; Alereon, Staccato and Wisair have demonstrated interoperability between those radios. Probably by the end of this week, we’ll be able to announce that there are more companies that have interoperated amongst the five. Within the WiMedia spec, there is a base rate already of 53 Mb/sec. Now your question specifically was, communicating with other radios such as a Freescale radio or a PulseLink radio. I think you have to stand back and say, why would we do this? Why would we impose a common communication scheme between proprietary radios and standardized radios? I think the other part of the question we have to answer is, if we were to do that, at what cost will it happen? Let’s look at that part first. If a common radio signaling mode was to happen, the first thing you would experience is (there hasn’t been a whole lot of investigation, so I can only speak from a theoretical standpoint) one would expect the radio architectures would have to change, and it’s also possible you’re looking at having complexity in cost to the chip itself. The other thing is a performance impact. By operating in a different mode, what are you doing to the overall capacity or performance of the radio or system? One easy way to understand that is if you take a look at 802.11g. It is mandated that 802.11g must be backward compatible with 802.11b, which is 11 Mbps. The motivation for that is ‘11b’ is widely deployed, really huge amount of infrastructure out there, and ‘11g’ was supposed to be a new version of it. The consequence of doing so has significant impact on the overall system. An 11g, happily operating at 54MB/sec between nodes in that network, will have to start doing a lot of their transfers down at the 11Mbps mode in the presence of an 11b. As such, 11b has impacted the performance of the network. And now if you take that back to the common signaling mode proposed by PulseLink, is there an installed base, or is there sufficient market interest or companies developing those types of product? The answer to all that is, “no.” There is no infrastructure, there [are] no deployed radios and as far as I’m aware, there’s only one company, PulseLink, doing their stuff. I don’t know how many companies plan to do it, or how many companies even know exactly what their technology is. The same is directly applicable to Freescale. So to begin with, there isn’t the motivation that there was with 11b development. But in that, look, I think as such, that’s why there hasn’t been a terrific amount of investigation into what type of performance or cost impact will take place on the system. Had that answer come back “yes” which at this point in the game doesn’t seem like it will, even if Freescale gets product out before other companies get product out, it doesn’t seem to have the momentum, directly. That was a significant justification for why companies chose not to even engage in those technical discussions because they said, “if we can’t justify it, then why would we ever do it?” But in UWB none of us have product. I’m saying, can you go to the store today as a consumer and buy a UWB-based product? The answer is no. Who knows really what status anyone is in until you can actually go to the store and buy something.
Now where Staccato is, and where a lot of the companies in WiMedia are, is in pre-production phase. I don’t think anyone’s in production yet. I know when Staccato will be in production and I know when many other companies will be in production and hopefully all of that will enable late 2006 consumer products. That’s what our customers are going for, that’s what the ODMs are shooting for, that’s what everyone’s production cycles are shooting for. The software from Microsoft Windows Vista will be there, certification from the regulatory agencies and from the USB implementers forum and from WiMedia will all start to happen at the beginning of the summer, the end of Q2. Not only will there be consumer products by the end of the year, but also those products will have silicon or solutions from multiple companies which is very powerful because some companies – if you look at Hewlett-Packard for example – when they chose to implement Bluetooth in the HP995C printer, they used both Silicon Wave and Cambridge Silicon Radio chips. It was important for the [HP] purchasing department that they had the capability to buy from two vendors. And when they introduced the product, maybe they didn’t have both in there right away, but they knew that they were interoperable.

7. What is your interpretation of the turmoil in the IEEE 802.15.3a working group?
Unfortunate that it deadlocked from a political standpoint. But to be honest, the IEEE should be given a lot of credit for having helped achieve a very mature UWB standard. The reason I say that is there was a tremendous amount of technical discussion before January 2003, when the call for proposals started to come in. UWB was kind of cloak and dagger. It was under NDA, people weren’t talking about it. Universities couldn’t even get information on it because no one really spoke about it. It was still a classified technology and those companies that had nothing to do with anything classified found it very NDA oriented material. I was at General Atomics and we spoke of spectral keying but we never told anybody without an NDA what spectral keying was, definitely the same thing for Freescale or XtremeSpectrum at the time. There was very little information being shared. Through that process, through that first year and even a little bit into 2004, there was a tremendous amount of technical work going on. At Freescale they have some very, very good engineers. They found a lot of holes, and a lot of authors of the multi-band proposals took very seriously those considerations and really used that as an opportunity to improve the technology. It was only when the IEEE was deemed too much of an unknown [entity] that the MBOA actually decided to formalize into a special interest group, and go through the incorporating process and actually plan to release it’s own specs. Up until that point, which was, I think, November 2004, the MBOA was only an off-line group trying to build support momentum, and absolutely wanted the IEEE process to work.
After the MBOA SIG became a SIG, there was still a tremendous amount of value seen in rejoining, providing back to the IEEE. But one of the problems that continued to persist was the political deadlock, which many of the companies involved saw as being a potential detriment to technology adoption. That’s why Ecma International ended up publishing a UWB specification in December of 2005. And Ecma is actually at the same level in the hierarchy of ISO-based standards. So you have IEEE and Ecma at the same level. Above that you have ANSI and above that you have ISO.

8. One of the leaders in the WiMedia effort seems to be Intel. Is this an indication that the WiMedia Alliance is focusing on the PC space as the first market space to enter and then you would expect to extend into some of the industries at a later time?
First off, the only specification that’s complete all the way up to the protocol level with an industry-recognizable logo is Certified Wireless USB. There is very active work going on inside the WiMedia Alliance and in collaboration with the Bluetooth SIG to determine the next generation Bluetooth. Mike Fowley of the Bluetooth SIG has engaged with both Freecale’s UWB forum and WiMedia. At this point in time, the Bluetooth SIG is still engaged in a lot of politics.
The WiMedia Alliance is also extremely active in IP. In fact they even have their own specification for IP, called WiNet. WiNet is IP over UWB and that is being married with a number of upper layer protocols which could include DLNA and UPNP for an IP-based network. The 1394 Trade Association has an engagement with WiMedia as well, but at this time, even within the 1394 Trade Association, the Wireless Working Group is fairly inactive. A lot of that is the same companies engaged all across the board. Within the WiMedia Alliance, the answer is all four markets: personal computing, consumer electronics, mobile devices, mobile phones and the automotive industry are all very critical markets.
In Europe, most mobile telephones have mini USB ports on them because it’s not only a good way to get on and off data, but it’s also become a universal charger plug. I have a smart phone. I charge my phone through the USB on my PC when I’m traveling so I don’t have to carry an extra adapter. So USB is certainly becoming more and more pervasive. It’s not only in PCs and PC peripherals but its gaining share in mobile phones, its gaining share in more typical consumer electronics like set top boxes.
The answer is that if there’s one standard that’s fully defined today with a logo and a compliance and interoperability program, that’s months away from being complete. The answer is, what can ship and be standard-compliant this year: Certified Wireless USB. So who are the early products to use that? And the answer is, its Wireless USB-enabled hard drives, printers, its digital still cameras, but it’s not embedded in the camera, it’s built into the docking station. Its Port/Port hubs like those Belkin introduced, its hubs that are integrated into a flat screen monitor.
Let me also talk about volume. I’m one of those people that break the trends of maybe a typical consumer. I keep TVs for a really long time. Once it’s set up and it’s stuck in the corner, I don’t touch it. I don’t care if it’s wireless. Once in a while, when I’m setting it up and I choose a location, I have had to pull co-ax through the wall to get the TV where I wanted it. But once it’s there it’s done. I do think there’s a need for wireless TV. I think it’s cool. But at the end of the day if I already have a flat screen or a large TV, I’m not going to throw it out just because. The next time that I go out to buy one, I’ll give it very serious consideration to buy that one. So the overall turnover and volume and just numbers on a yearly basis on TVs is in process, but it’s not dramatically the same on the order of consumer electronics like digital still cameras which have a lifespan of maybe 3 years, or a PC which has anywhere from 18 months to 2-1/2, 3 years, or to a mobile phone which has huge volumes and has an average lifespan I think of 9-15 months. Those numbers are larger [than] they have and it’s more likely adoption’s going to happen in those industries much quicker. How many TVs do you have around your house that are maybe 10 years or older? We’re plagued with this thing that if it doesn’t break, you can’t justify buying a new one.

9. Is there anything else you would like to tell our readers as a final note?
Staccato is well positioned in this industry. We have an aggressive product portfolio and we really believe that we’re enabling the market by having single chip complete solution, very easy to design in. We understand that a lot of the companies integrating our solution will have little to very no area of experience. We’re trying to make it as easy for them as possible by putting it in the package that we do and providing the services we do. Ultimately it boils down to: I know there’s always a lot of attention between what’s going on proprietary versus what’s standard-based, and it doesn’t always get presented as proprietary and standard. You have specifications, but what makes a standard a standard is when you have an industry that’s building product which is interoperable. I know Kirsten [West] may differ slightly in her opinion because she places a lot of emphasis on time-to-market. I think that’s important, but when the time to market is as nominal as it is today, I think it’s inconsequential, because it’s time-to-market of what, time-to-market of first production, or time-to-market of interoperable products with competitive pricing and competitive optimization. It’s questionable whether or not there’s any advantage in the industry right now with regard to time-to-market. There may be, there may not be. At the end of the day, we have some customers that will not engage with a company that is doing a proprietary solution, because they’re purchasing departments have rules that say there need to be multiple sources. Additionally, you really need competition to drive down prices because these are very price-conscious markets. Staccato’s product at sub $10 for what we offer has really been accepted by a lot of our Asian customers, especially the ODMs. And they say that $20 is too much. In fact they say that $10 is good, but we want to see that your solution is going to be lower-cost. The thing that I’ve seen a lot of negative-ness on is the fact that Belkin has priced their product at 130-something dollars. A lot of our ODMs that we’ve engaged with, that also probably supply to Belkin, think that their bill of material is much lower. Now Belkin can do this because of where they stand in the industry. They’re the first-to-market. There will be a premium, but because of the number of companies that are going to engage in this, that premium will diminish quite rapidly. In fact a lot of our customers see wireless as a feature that will help them maintain or increase market share. It’s kind of a different strategy. It’s not “if” it will happen, it’s “when” will it happen.
[As] for the future, let’s say that Freescale decided that their solution is good for some applications, made a good niche, and maybe they really want to support Certified Wireless USB in a mobile phone platform or they want to put it in a Set Top Box. I have the utmost confidence that if there’s a need for it, they will acquire the technology that makes the P&L statements work for the various business groups and they will either take it through partnerships with companies like Staccato or they’ll develop it in-house, since they have very good radio expertise, one of the best, or they will end up acquiring a company that they can jump on the band wagon real quick. Things happen with big companies and it doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day if Freescale came to us and made a proposal to buy the company, our board’s going to listen. We are engaged with groups within Motorola and I’m sure many other companies are as well. The fact that we started off on a bad foot with some of the guys at Motorola doesn’t mean anything. All it means is that my sales guy is going to take a PO from them, no problem.
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More information about Staccato here...

This interview ran in our Jan 30, 2006 newsletter issue.