It’s very odd to see the Wall Street Journal today complaining about the EC’s application of anti-trust law to Intel. After all the WSJ is the organ of American business, and America pretty much invented modern anti-trust law with the Sherman Act of 1890.
It looks as if Intel will be adopting the ‘there seems to have been a bit of a misunderstanding M’lud’ defence to the EC’s charges against it, with Intel’s lawyer saying that it was ‘a failure of logic’ to suggest that payments made to allegedly delay launches of AMD-based products were part of any kind of anti-AMD activity.
Tax paid (or rather not paid) by private equity funds should be investigated by the Inland Revenue, says today’s report by the Treasury Select Committee of MPs which has been investigating private equity companies.
It’s been a pretty miserable Q2 for the chip sector. Although the semiconductor industry’s overall revenues declined sequentially by only 1 per cent in Q2 (after a 6 per cent decline in Q1), many companies have found profits elusive.
Colin Stevens, former CFO of Memec which became the world's third largest distributor before being bought by Avnet, tells a tale of cultural differences as the company expanded into Japan.
Sitting with a glass of fizzy water over a one course lunch the other day I reflected that, in years to come, historians will look back on our age and call it The Age of Masochism.
The scattering of the Crolles2 partners is now complete, with STMicroelectronics saying it will join up with IBM for basic semiconductor process R&D, following the example of its former Crolles compatriot Freescale which announced it was joining the IBM group some months ago. The third member of the Crolles2 triumvirate, NXP, departed Crolles to join TSMC earlier in the year.
How quickly the private equity’s sortie into the semiconductor industry has run into trouble. Before the year is out since Blackstone snapped up Freescale and KKR bagged up NXP, both the acquired companies are running into trouble.
Is there a design crunch coming up? Well, yes there always seems to be a design crunch coming up, but this time it’s a really mega-crunch, according to Kazuyoshi Yamada, the vice president and general manager, Custom SoC Solutions Unit, of NEC Electronics America.
Here are the ten best ideas for founding a start-up semiconductor company.
The difficulties of forecasting the semiconductor industry have prompted analysts Future Horizons to resort to the application of chaos theory.
The woes of Freescale in moving from a $260m profit in Q206 five months before it was taken over by private equity funds, to a $288m loss eight months after it was taken over by private equity, can partly be explained by Motorola’s struggles in the cellphone market where it has now conceded the No.2 spot to Samsung.
The reason given for choosing Numonyx as the name for the Intel-ST flash joint venture is that it derives from menomonics, the art of using an acronym, a word, or a phrase to help remember another word, phrase or a list. But could it also be telling us something about the future of non-volatile memory?
Sex with a zillionaire is not all it’s cracked up to be, according to a novel written by zillionaire Tom Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital company, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.
Julius Blank, one of Fairchild's eight founders, tells a hilarious yarn about the night Bob Noyce turned up to join Shockley Semiconductor. Charlie Sporck recounts the tale in his book Spinoff.
Does it matter if the cost of running fabs is more in Europe than Asia? It obviously would matter if fab is to be the major value-add of the chip business but, like production operations in many other industries, it’s R&D and design which increasingly make up the value-add.
Hearing that the private equity companies KKR and Blackstone were in talks, now suspended, to buy the EDA company Cadence, took me back to a dinner in Greece in April where the CEO of an EDA company was saying he gets about ten calls a week from private equity people. "They don't propose anything specific. They just say: 'Let's talk'", he said.
Lawksa-mercy what a laugh, the rebounding price of memory might get all those semiconductor industry analysts having to put their forecasts up again.
Brilliant! Exactly what London needs. A free WiFi service opened this week for London. It is accessible for the 22 kilometre stretch of the Thames between Greenwich and Millbank.
King of the Semiconductor Salesmen is, of course, Jerry Sanders, while Tom Bay, first head of sales at Fairchild Semiconductor, defined semiconductor marketing, and Bill Davidow, head of Operation Crush which won Intel the IBM PC design win, intellectualised semiconductor marketing practice in his book High Technology Marketing.
It probably won’t do the managements of NEC Electronics and Samsung Electronics much harm to have the chill breath of private equity scrutiny blowing down their necks, after all they’re big boys, and can look after themselves.
One has to say, the rumoured, but so far denied, take over of Verizon is the best thing Arun Sarin could have come up with since he took over the Vodafone CEO-ship from Chris Gent.
It’s really good to see Intel doing the right thing and, what’s more, it’s good to see Intel apparently doing a U-Turn without blaming anyone else for it.
Why does a guy start spending his money like a drunken sailor on shore leave? Well he could actually be a drunken sailor on shore leave, but another likely reason is because of a woman.
Steve Jobs, of course, is God Almighty, but Andy Herzfeld tells a hilarious yarn about the Great Man’s foibles in his book Revolution in the Valley.
The experiences of NXP and Freescale since being bought by private equity companies seem to have differed enormously. NXP appears to be following a growth strategy, whereas Freescale simply seems to be cost-cutting.
For something like 30 years the status of engineers has been something that has been periodically bewailed.
Conrad Black has done us all a favour. When the conversation runs out in the pub, and some bright spark challenges: ‘Name ten famous Canadians’, we’ll all know at least one.
It's something of a surprise to see a distinguished academic wanting to return people to the days when design was done in garages. Mind you, garages spawned HP and Apple. But somehow one assumed those days were gone.
Thanks to Al Haun for suggesting this one, and for putting forward some of the names. Here they are, the ten best chip designers:
At last someone who has been high in the US telecommunications hierarchy, has spoken up about the lousy state of the US wireless networks. Even if his comments were self-serving.
The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has told the Guardian that the tax breaks enjoyed by private equity companies may be curtailed either in the Autumn pre-budget report or next year’s Spring budget.
Interesting to see Intel, for so long the exponent of the big clunking chip, argue that simple cores are better than complex ones.
XMOS Semiconductor has come up with a new type of chip called SDS (software defined silicon) to give back to the designers of consumer electronics goods the freedom they used to enjoy to innovate.
Sir Clive Sinclair tells a good yarn about how his company came up with the world’s first single-chip scientific calculator.
If anything goes to show the importance of pedigree and geography when it comes to chip technology, it is the link from Inmos, the 1970s start-up, to the fact that Bristol has more chip designers than anywhere else in Europe.
While Intel codenames its processors, during development, after the names of American rivers, PicoChip of Bath goes one better by calling its processors after the names of Bath pubs.
XMOS, the semiconductor industry's most intriguing start-up, is expected to launch on Monday with a statement of its intentions, a description of its initial products and a compelling proposition for the consumer electronics industry.
Are things going a bit awry at Freescale? Lay-offs, and a capex cut from 9 per cent of sales to 7 per cent, are making people a bit edgy about the outcome of last year’s buy-out.
Not an easy one. The chip industry has been built on the shoulders of many genius engineers, sung and unsung.
Government investigations into the private equity industry have begun to expose it for what it is: a witty wheeze.
The underlying fragility of the memory business model has been exposed in all its awfulness by the troubles at Micron.
You have to ask the question? Could the quarter of a billion euros paid to Intel by the Irish government have been better spent?
One of the most famous yarns in the history of the chip industry is told about Kazuo Iwama of Sony who was the brother-in-law of Sony founder Akio Morita, and Morita’s successor as president of Sony.
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