On May 14, 2009 Texas Instruments announced it had acquired Luminary Micro, the leading supplier of ARM Cortex-M3 based microcontrollers. The Stellaris family of Cortex-M3 MCUs will be added to TI’s product portfolio.
The entire Luminary Micro team in Austin, TX is joining TI. The Stellaris family will become a brand name within TI. The tools and support developed by Luminary Micro, such as StellarisWare, will be incorporated into TI’s programs.
Semico Spin
TI’s acquisition of Luminary Micro allows the company to leap frog its MCU roadmap.
The company is the largest supplier of ARM based products across several product types - MCUs, DSPs, applications processors and cell phone baseband chips. ARM is also the fastest growing architecture in the 32-bit MCU segment.
TI has been shipping ARM 7 based MCUs (TMS470) for several years. It did announce a Cortex R4 (TMS570) a few years ago. However, this only began shipping in late 2008. The TI ARM MCU roadmap has appeared stagnant for the last couple of years. The Luminary acquisition changes this and puts TI back on the ARM MCU fast track.