ST-Ericsson closing down? Say bye to Novathor.

ST Ericsson, creator of the Novathor chip powering some of the smartphones, is cutting down over 1,600 jobs and might probably close down due to lower demand for its chips.

ST-Ericsson’s Novathor chips have been powering a lot of Nokia’s handsets back in 2011 and have been used by other phone manufacturers like Sony on their first batch of Xperia handsets. Probably, the biggest drop in orders came from Nokia as their market share shrunk in the last couple of years.

Back in January, ST Ericsson announced their own NovaThor L8580 Quad-core chip (which has four ARM Cortex A9 cores clocked at 2.5GHz, a PowerVR SGX544 GPU and integrated LTE) with succeeding reports they’re pushing the clock speed to 3.0GHz.

ST-Ericsson is a joint venture between Ericsson and ST-Microelectronics formed back in 2008.

{source}