UK orders Chinese biz to sell majority stake in Scottish chipmaker The British government has ordered a China-owned entity to sell its stake in a Scottish chip company under the authority of the National Security and Investment Act 2021. Glasgow-based Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) Limited is a fabless semiconductor biz with a range of chips and modules listed on its website, …
Who knew FTDI was a uk company? The vast majority of available chips like this are now Chinese anyway, thar protectionist ship sailed a decade ago. Irreverent company a strategic UK asset??? This says more about the state of silicon companies in the UK that anything about this particular company.
ASIC design house is not an asset to sniff at, even if fabless. Besides, FTDI chips are still the standard/default[1] choice in USB to serial/SPI/I2C/GPIO/weird in-house programmable protocol[2] you may need, and they're a valuable debug/development tool in electronics (to the point most SBCs -- a la Raspberry Pi -- include an USB to Serial chip straight on the PCB for console/log access).
In my experience, USB to serial FTDI chips (as long as they're the genuine article) had the best Windows compatibility by far (other than the Arduino thingamajigs that use alternative chips); dongles with other chips (esp. those with Prolific) depended on how many corners the dongle-maker cut (on Linux -- GNU or not -- I've never had any issues with any chip as long as the driver was available).
[1]: Despite doing some very dodgy stuff with their windows drivers (search elReg for more, and note that the fallout of these changes was felt mostly on customers who bought a product that used the counterfeit chip -- whether on purpose or because the OEM was scammed by their suppliers)
[2]: FTDI provides a closed-source SDK to wrangle control of their more feature-full chips which allows uses like implementing an USB to JTAG dongle.
The only real problem I have with China owning FTDI is what horrors they could sneak into their proprietary Windows drivers, which are automatically downloaded and installed by Windows as soon as a device is plugged in!
But rather than cracking down on ownership of hardware companies, a better strategy would be to tell Borkzilla to stop automatically installing drivers, especially when generic drivers exist which could be shipped with their shitty OS
The politicians in the UK are more beholden to what their Washington overlords tell them to do, than what is in the best interests of UK citizens. When the last bit of technology is sold off or shut down or turned into ashes, will they still be able to lick the boots of their masters? Good boy, here's a bone.
Can anybody explain what FTDIHL has to do with the Duchy of Lancaster?
Is that where GTDIHL is located despite FTDI itself being headquartered in Glasgow?
I can't find any mention of Glasgow on the Wikipedia page for the Duchy...
https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/chancellor-of-the-duchy-of-lancaster
The role is a minister without portfolio role, mea ING they don't run a department but have specific responsibilities given to them by the prime minister. Including the relevant legislation used to force this sale.
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