Texas Instruments will lay off 1,700 people and stop designing chips for mobile devices. The Dallas semiconductor giant says the news is in line with its previously announced decision to focus on chips embedded into a range of wireless products other than smartphones and tablets.
“These job reductions are something we do with a heavy heart because they impact people we care deeply about,” said Greg Delagi, TI’s senior vice president of embedded processing. The company said the cuts will take affect over several quarters, and will affect employees worldwide. About 500 jobs will be cut in Dallas. Overall, TI is eliminating just under 5% of its workforce, based on 2011 end-of-year numbers. The company says the cuts will save roughly $450 million a year, beginning next year.
TI said that device manufacturers are increasingly developing their own chipsets, making this a more difficult business for outside suppliers. Samsung, currently the world’s leading maker of smartphones, has its own chip design and manufacturing business. Currently, TI’s OMAP processors power Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2, but the Galaxy Tab 7.0, the Galaxy Tab 4G LTE and the Galaxy Note 10.1 all use Samsung’s Exynos chipset.
Last year, Texas Instruments decided not to focus on developing quad-core chipsets for smartphones and tablets, leaving that market segment open for Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and others. However, the company has packed four cores into its Keystone Multicore chipsets, designed for wireless base stations.
Yesterday Texas Instruments told The Dallas Morning News that it tried to sell its mobile chips business before closing it and eliminating jobs, but the company said the two parties could not come to an agreement. It declined to name the potential buyer.
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