With the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) going on in Silicon Valley, it seems that Freescale Semiconductor has been in the news continuously over the last few days. First, there was Bolaji Ojo’s analysis about Freescale moving closer to an IPO. Bolaji based his analysis on Freescale’s sales growth, higher design wins, an improved dept position, and a vibrant equity market, and expects the company to file for an IPO later this year or at the very latest at the beginning of 2011. Then the company also revealed ultra low-current MCUs for the medical devices market while at the same time gunning for the DSP market and incumbent heavyweight Texas Instruments (TI). If this weren’t enough already, Freescale also announced strategic partnership agreements with several software companies including Enea, Green Hills Software, and Mentor Graphics to work on enablement solutions for the QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

The last one was particularly interesting since I did get a chance to talk briefly to Raja Tabet, the VP of Software and Enablement at Freescale, regarding the announcement. Due to my poor organizational skills and the inability to distinguish between Central and Eastern Time, sorry Raja, I did not have anything handy to jot down direct quotes, but I will do my best to paraphrase whatever I do remember. The first thing that is apparent is that Freescale is trying to create an open software ecosystem that will enable customers to have a choice when it comes to deeply optimized software stacks for their products. While each one of the aforementioned companies has particular fields of expertise which Freescale intends to leverage, there is one area in which all of them clearly overlap: real-time operating systems (RTOS). Enea has the OES which is a multicore RTOS, as wells as the OESck which is a high-performance DSP RTOS. Green Hills Software has developed the Integrity RTOS which according to the company is the only commercial operating system that has attained EAL6+ High Robustness certification by the NSA-managed NIAP lab. Finally, Mentor Graphics has the Nucleus RTOS which is optimized for resource-constrained devices. In short, customer will soon have an extended set of OS choices from which to pick when developing with Freescale devices.

With all this OS talk, I could not resist asking Raja what his take was on Android. He was quick to point out that the Android platform was indeed an important strategic objective, and that the Mentor Graphics strategic agreement fit well with that objective. In 2009 Mentor Graphics acquired Linux/Android specialist Embedded Alley at which point Mentor Graphics already pointed out that it was planning to port Android to Freescale PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors. Raja was also quick to point out on several occasions that Freescale has extensive internal software capability and has a dedicated team of over 1000 software engineers, partially due to many acquisitions the company made over the years starting with Metrowerks back in 1999. The new strategic partnerships will enable Freescale to share a lot of this internal software IP with the partners as well, fostering an open two-way relationship that should benefit both sides.

So, after all this, where does this leave Freescale? Well, certainly the media and the company management seem pretty enthusiastic. Partnerships with other companies of course help out as well showing that other companies are will to invest and work with Freescale. With NXP Semiconductor filing for IPO earlier this year, an IPO exit seems certainly a possibility. Could another company be interested in acquiring Freescale? Well, with a long term debt of about $7.4 billion that seems somewhat unlikely. But who knows, Apple with its recent semiconductor acquisition appetite, particularly Austin based Intrinsity comes to mind and the recent ARM rumors, and a $40 billion war chest, could certainly stomach it - either way, things are likely to remain interesting for Freescale over the course of this year. The only tip I would give Freescale management is to channel some of this positive energy and excitement to their employees. Being Austin based I run into a lot of these folks, and unlike upper management and the media, they are a little less enthusiastic about the company’s future at the moment.