Zoran will sell “more complete solutions” as a result...
Zoran will sell “more complete solutions” as a result of its $166 million acquisition of Microtune and will eventually combine the company’s silicon TV tuners with DTV processors/demodulators, CEO Levy Gerzberg told analysts in a conference call. The deal is…
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expected to close in Q4. “The plans for how we bring the products together will have to evolve over time,” Gerzberg said. Microtune and Zoran have been working for “a number of years” on reference designs using their respective ICs for set-top boxes and combining technologies “will start coming in the near future,” Gerzberg said. The companies will likely merge their demodulator technologies, he said. While Zoran demodulators are used to “address several geographies,” Microtune’s chips have been confined to China. In a set-top box, Zoran’s and Microtune’s respective chips could carry a $12-$13 average selling price, based on the $10 Zoran gets for its demodulators, company officials said. CE manufacturers are slowly shifting away from can tuners toward silicon versions that are expected to be in nearly 50 percent of TVs by 2012-2013, Microtune CEO Jim Fontaine said. Microtune also will give Zoran a strong position in the cable modems and cable set-top boxes that produce 80 percent of Microtune’s annual revenue. Microtune cable STB customers in the U.S. include Arris, Cisco and Motorola. It claims an 85-95 percent share of the market for tuners in DOCSIS 3.0 modems. Among Microtune’s TV customers are Samsung and Panasonic. Microtune’s business will be combined under Zoran’s Home Entertainment Division, company officials said. Zoran also will gain a tuner business as it seeks to expand use of the frame rate conversion (FRC) technology it acquired in buying Let it Wave. Zoran FRCs have been deployed in Europe and the company recently landed a new “tier one” customer, said Gerzberg, who declined to identify the company. Microtune has 270 employees, including those in design centers in Dallas, Germany and Shanghai.