Great Day At IEF2007

Loads of old friends turned up. A great Japanese contingent led by Satoru Ito, CEO of Renesas, Tetsuro Higashi, CEO of Tokyo Electron, Susumu Kohyama, CEO of Toshiba Ceramics, Eiji Takeda from Hitachi ULSI and the great Dr Tsugio Makimoto of Hitachi, Sony and 'Makimoto's Wave'.

Also a great US contingent with the CAD guys led by Aart de Geus, CEO of Synposys and Wally Rhines CEO of Mentor, both stirring things up from the floor with some precisely targeted questioning.

And the Europeans naturally put up a good show.

The ambitions of the foundries were treated with great suspicion and there to deal with the issue was one of Asia's most prominent chip men, Richard Chang, president and CEO of SMIC.

That feisty industry legend Rahul Sud, who single-handedly knocked Intel out of the SRAM business, founded Lattice Semiconductor, invented the GAL, ran emerging businesses at ST for a few years and is now a VC, was prowling around looking like a man with a plan.

The irrepressible Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, demolished a few industry shibboleths.

1. "Fab-lite doesn't mean fab-lite it means fabless. When these companies say they're going fab-lite at 45nm it means they'll be fabless at 45nm."

2. "When CEOs say: 'The challenging conditions in the XYZ market negatively impacted our overall first quarter results', CEOs actually mean: 'We got it wrong. We positioned ourselves wrong. We executed badly'. You can't blame the market" said Penn, "it's all about markets and positioning. The chip market is always challenging."

3."When CEOs say: 'We plan to target niche markets with high-growth potential' they're really saying we can't make commodity products, because there's no such thing as a high-growth niche market, all chip products are commodity products."

All in all a great day, and we haven't even had a cocktail party yet. Judging from previous IEFs that won't be the case for long.