Ross Tech eliminates 35 jobs in new layoff

Electronic News, Dec 16, 1996 by Jim DeTar

Austin, Texas--Ross Technology has eliminated an additional 35 positions of its total work force of about 300, the company's second layoff in as many months. In November, Ross eliminated 50 positions, or 14 percent of its workforce at that time, in what it termed a "necessary adjustment" (EN, Nov. 18). Most of the jobs eliminated at that time were said by Ross to be temporary or contract employees.

The company said this new action is being taken "to adjust employment to a business model that diversifies Ross from complete dependence on microprocessor sales to also include system sales, and to bring operating costs in line with anticipated revenue during that transition."

Ross, a microprocessor design center for the SPARC workstation industry, said that key R&D projects are unaffected by this action and that operational staffing is now at approximately the same level as when ROSS had its initial public offering in November 1995.

Ross is a majority-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited. A minority position in Ross is also held by Sun Microsystems. As of Sept. 30, the company was held 60 percent by Fujitsu, 5 percent by Sun, and 35 percent by employees and the public.

Earlier this year, Sun decided not to exercise its rights under a stock purchase warrant issued Nov. 10, 1995 that would have allowed Sun to up its 5 percent stake in Ross. That warrant subsequently expired on May 8 (EN, May 13). In a letter to Roger D. Ross, chairman/president of Ross, Sun stated at that time, "This decision does not imply any lessening of commitment of Sun to Ross or its investment in Ross."

Separately, Ross last week also introduced 180MHz hyperSparc MPUs with a tightly-coupled 512-kilobyte secondary cache. The MPU upgrades, the first based on the company's Colorado 4 hyperSparc implementation, are designed to provide multiprocessing on Sparcstation 10, Sparcstation 20 and Sparcstation 630/670/690 machines.

"Our Colorado 4 implementation provides further proof of the inherent scalability and extensibility of the Sparc version 8 architecture, enabling Ross Technology to continue providing its upgrade customers with the latest technology at the greatest possible value," said Mr. Ross.

In terms of performance, the 180MHz hyperSparc offers an estimated 200 SPECint92 and 219 SPECfp92 on a production compiler. In a twin-CPU configuration, the 180MHz hyperSparc offers SPECrate--int92 of 8893 and SPECrate--fp92 of 9470. Ross said that pricing information is available from the company.