Mannerisms

In his fine History of Semiconductor Engineering, Bo Lojek tells how the Motorola guys brought into Fairchild after Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove left to found Intel, had a name for the Fairchild marketing team led by Jerry Sanders III, later to found AMD.

Once upon a time a company produced a 'Futures Catalogue'. It ran to 100 pages and included detailed specifications of all the company's future products.

Fifteen months ago, Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC, declared: "We believe Intel stepped well over the line of aggressive competition on the merits, and engaged in unfair, deceptive and anti-competitive conduct. The sum total of all this anti-competitive conduct unfairly prevented companies from competing, bolstered Intel's monopoly, and harmed consumers by stunting innovation, diminishing quality, and keeping prices higher than they would otherwise be."

In the wireless arena, ARM is ahead of Intel in process, architecture and design, and looks likely to stay there for a generation or two.

Here, according to IHS iSuppli, are the ten largest suppliers of industrial ICs:

In the Land of the Free is the system rigged against employees?

This is news!

Now . . . .a

transistorised

chopper

So, 50 years ago, starts an ad in EW's issue of May 24^th 1961.

'Things are bad,' Ed confides to his diary, 'the private equity company which owns us has not only put in its own person as COO, but the new COO has gone and appointed her own people to all the key positions in the company. I don't know who's saying what to who, who's reporting to who, or who knows stuff I don't know.'

The notorious '2 & 20' fees of private equity companies have come under scrutiny by Yale University and the University of Maastricht in a study commissioned by the FT.

John East was, for 22 years, CEO of Actel. His first job was at Fairchild in the Wild West days of the Silicon Frontier.

The Yanks are much better than the Brits at understanding that governments can't do much that is useful.

Back in the century before last, a very great engineering company invented the first automatic dial telegraph, the water meter and the electric dynamo.

It seems a bit rich for a company proposing to spend $12.5 billion on capex this year to be asking other companies, and government institutions, for help in developing a technology which will, mostly, benefit that one company.

Huge 2012 capex budgets at Intel, Samsung and TMC will skew the industry to make it extremely challenging, and in some cases impossible, for smaller companies to remain competitive, says IC Insights.

Thanks to thinkdigit for this one - the ten best Android apps:

The recently appointed CEO of train wreck ST-Ericsson is turning out to be a master of the art of stating the boringly bloody obvious.

'The provision of suitable storage constitutes a major engineering problem in computer design. Memories are inevitably slower than the associated processors, and resort has to be made to parallel memory operation to achieve reasonable processing speeds.'

So, 50 years ago, starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of May 24^th 1961 written by K.L.Smith from IBM British Laboratories.

'It gets worse, much worse' Ed confides to his diary, 'Horrible Harriet Huntsman (the new COO appointed without him being consulted by his private equity owners) has appointed a new head of HR (as if I care) a new head of manufacturing (I can cope with that) a new head of marketing and sales (this is a mega-bummer) and a new head of engineering (another mega-bummer). I don't think she's stopped there.'

There were some notable company cock-ups in 2011. Who did worst?