Posted by : bpburnwal on Sep 29, 2003 - 05:34 PM General

OTTAWA (CP) - Tundra Semiconductor Corp. retracted its announcement Tuesday that it had reached a deal to take over a Motorola Inc. product line.
The Ottawa-based chip designer said talks are continuing and the morning news release had been "inadvertently" distributed. That release announced an agreement with Motorola to develop new technology connecting PowerPC microprocessors to peripheral devices.

Tundra (TSX: TUN) also said it had purchased Motorola's PowerPC Host Bridge line of industry-standard devices that link the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus to PowerPC host processors. Applications include Internet-protocol routers and asynchronous transfer mode switches.

Almost four hours later, Tundra distributed another statement saying that "the two companies are currently negotiating, but have not yet reached agreement on the deal described in the news release."

It added that it expects to communicate the results of these negotiations within two weeks.

In the earlier news release, Tundra - whose shares were halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange before the start of trading Tuesday - did not disclose the financial terms of a proposed deal.

Tundra said in its subsequent release that it expected the purchase price would be paid in cash and no Tundra shares would be issued to Motorola.

"As a leading system interconnect provider, Tundra is an ideal company to develop the next generation of PowerPC host bridge technology," Bill Dunnigan, general manager of Motorola's computing platforms division, stated in the initial release.

"Tundra's acquisition of our PowerPC host bridge portfolio, together with a collaborative agreement to develop next-generation host bridge technology, provides our collective customers best-in-class products with a roadmap for the future."