David Potter, the founder of Psion, tells a good yarn about the company’s early days, when Psion was getting along by developing computer games. Psion was founded in 1980 and this story takes place in 1981.
If you buy your iPhone from Apple, today, you’re limited to two per person. If you buy it from AT&T you’re limited to one per person.
People have been worrying for ages that the game isn’t worth the candle in backing semiconductor companies.
If a man can truly be judged by the company he keeps, then Gordon Brown’s made a good start.
Unexpected mega-shifts are appearing in the industry which signalling a rearrangement in the balance of power in various markets.
This is a tricky one. These are not the ten best written or most entertaining books, or most authoritative or most insightful books on the industry, but each possesses one, or more, of those qualities. Some are by insiders, some by outsiders like academics and journalists.
If ever there was a case for not giving up pursuing basic process R&D, as NXP, Freescale and STMicroelectronics have said they will do, it is the recent announcement of Fujitsu’s success in reducing leakage current at 45nm.
The potential for solid state storage in laptops looks pretty enormous with density-boosting technologies like MLC and Quadbit still to be applied to dense, high volume, SSDs.
So far, the furore over the private equity industry seems to have boiled down to a Gordon Brown cock-up. By mucking up a tax concession, he has encouraged financiers to switch from venture capital investment to private equity buy-outs.
In iWeek, the week that is supposed to witness the transformation, re-invention and Second Coming of the mobile phone, it's worth asking how on earth does Steve Jobs get his people to come up with these blockbuster products?
Sell the sizzle not the steak is advertising's oldest chiche. Amended for the tech sector, it's: 'Sell version 1.0 as though it's 3.0' Or even version 100.0.
Brian Halla, CEO of National Semiconductor, previously at LSI Logic and Intel, tells how the whole industry's economics used to come down to one thing: how do you keep the fab full, and so defray the enormous cost of building it.
The home automation people seem to have missed what is absolutely obvious to everyone who lives in a home: that every piece of kit in it has a different plug, socket, and wireless interface.
There's always a bit of a thrill about a technology which threatens to be totally revolutionary, tearing up the established economic norms and making the established companies run for cover. Nowadays, it doesn't happen very often. So Xg Technology has a bit of a fascination for me.
Between glugs of iced pink wine, the odd nap, and the occasional dip down here in the South of France, I read the debut novel of Gene Wilder, the famous American film director and actor.
Lot of competition for this one. After much sifting, here are the ten silliest applications:
Before 45nm generation wafers are hot from the furnaces, the consortia for the 32nm generation are gearing up for commercial introduction around the end of the decade.
John Daane, CEO of Altera, reckons that you can't blame the private equity funds for bad decisions, but you can blame the managements which sell out to them.
It's a tough old world for aspirant billionaires. Apparently some hedge funds are making it a pre-condition for taking on a new partner that the new partner secures a 'post-nup' agreement with his or her spouse.
Hermann Hauser, founder and CEO of Acorn Computers, then founder and CEO of VC company Amadeus, and the backer of numerous successful start-ups from ARM, to Virata to Element 14 to Plastic Logic and Icera, tells an amusing tale about one of his less successful ventures.
Hans Snook was the most colourful and successful of all the early cellular pioneers, establishing the Orange network. But he stumbled into the wireless telecoms industry completely by chance.
Being a high-tech CEO, and being certain about anything, appear to be incompatible these days.
Rahul Sud, former Inmos chip designer, and the founding president of Lattice Semiconductor, now General Partner at venture capitalists Silicon Capital, has come up with a new industry business model.
It's only June and mergers and acquisitions deals are over $2.3 trillion and set to beat last year's record of $3.6 trillion. On average, this year, buyers have paid a whopping 50 per cent over market capitalisation for their acquisitions, double the premium paid last year.
How is it that people who spend most of their time in offices get to be so macho in their work?
When the biggest solid state drives seen in laptops seem to be 32GB (Sony, Fujitsu, Dell etc) it comes as a pleasant surprise to see 256GB SSD modules on the market.
The electronics industry's ten best quotes span 150 years. They are as follows:
Anxious to wean the best man off a natural obsession with logistics and timings at a recent wedding, I asked him (he's in the wireless industry) whether Wimax or cellular would be the dominant 4G technology.
What would Cicero have thought about Apax giving up its venture capital activity to concentrate on buy-outs?
Some people really take the biscuit. How thick-skinned can you be? John Mayo, the former deputy CEO of Marconi who, with CEO Lord George Simpson, turned GEC from an industrial giant into a big fat zero, is now trying to tell Vodafone how to run its business.
One of the famous events of early chip industry history was the reaction of Sherman Fairchild, backer of Fairchild Semiconductor, to the resignations of Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove when they went to found Intel. His reaction was to hire the top management of Motorola Semiconductor. Pasquale Pistorio remembers how he was sorely tempted.
Founded in 1990 with less than two million pounds of venture capital, ARM looked destined for a rocky ride. Founding CEO Sir Robin Saxby remembers a grim race against time to establish the company before the money ran out.
SEMI, the equipment people, have come up with encouraging industry news - that device manufacturers will only increase their capital spending on equipment by three per cent and their spending on fab construction by between four to five per cent this year.
MoSys, which has licensed its 1T-SRAM technology to the leading foundries, has scaled its technology down to 55nm for NEC Electronics.
Girlish hysterics which have seen analysts slash their forecast for the year, now turn out to have been just that, hysterics caused by false assumptions based on one quarter's figures
Is Wintel withering? First Dell, then Toshiba, erstwhile staunch Intel-ites, let in the alien hordes of AMD, then Dell goes back to selling PCs with an old OS after Microsoft Vista bombs.
The ten most over-used cliches commonly used in presentations, and even in conversations, in the industry, are listed below.
Could EDA be used to solve the world's most difficult problems e.g. access to food and water, and ending disease and global warming? This is the intriguing thesis of Steven Levitan, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and Chairman of DAC being held this week in San Diego.
Apple could perform a notable double whammy this month by saving both the smartphone market and the solid state laptop market.
Asked what they had learned from eachother over the years, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates gave revealing answers at the All Things Digital industry conference in California last week.
I see that the new (but under construction) web-site of XMOS Semiconductor, the start-up founded by the Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University, David May FRS, who invented the Inmos Transputer, is displaying a description of its products: "The low-cost, low-power alternative to FPGAs".
It is a little known fact that, before he left Fairchild Semiconductor to become the CEO of National Semiconductor, Charlie Sporck had several meetings with Sir John Clark, CEO of Plessey, about him becoming CEO of Plessey Semiconductors.
I notice that Intel has adopted the habit of putting at the bottom of every press announcement the words: 'Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation'.
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