ASIC chip design and manufacturing house, Zilog Inc has announced further changes to the company structure to cut costs while it faces the slump in the semiconductor market. The company has now decided to streamline its sales force and focus on the distribution channel. The changes will result in 33 marketing jobs being cut from the 1,500 plus staff. This is the second time that Campbell, California-based Zilog has announced restructuring plans since the beginning of May, when the company said it planned to realign its business to focus on the communication, home entertainment and embedded control markets. Chief executive Curt Crawford, who was appointed from Lucent Technologies Inc in January (CI No 3,321), said Zilog was focusing on too many markets and too many product lines. This latest round of changes will see the company jazzing up its core family of Z8 microcontrollers and microprocessors and Digital Signal Processors (CI No 3,322). It hopes the restructuring will enable it reduce its spending as it continues to be stung by declining chip sales and falling revenues, which it is attributing to the Asian economic crisis. The company’s realignment has been spearheaded by Zilog’s newly appointed chief strategy officer, W Norman Wu. Zilog reported a first quarter net loss of $19.9m on revenue down 29.4% at $49.5m (CI No 3,396).
