There’s now every chance of getting a decent pint in Tokyo. A number of brew-pubs, micro-breweries and bars selling real beer are flourishing there, and a few, discerning Japanese are beginning to learn there’s more to life than the frozen, fizzy, tasteless offerings of Kirin, Sapporo, Asahi et al.
The Curse of the Wires. The Bane of the Boxes. The Misery of the Rat’s Nest. Whatever you like to call it, it’s practically over. Next year the box manufacturers start to put wireless USB interfaces in their products.
Monkey Island is in the middle of the Thames, or in the middle of Tokyo Bay, take your pick.
Venture capital-backed start-up semiconductor companies are a rarity in Japan, but that could be about to change as THine, the Tokyo fabless mixed signal semiconductor specialist, is now hoping to extend the model by kick-starting a VC fund for high-tech start-ups.
If there is to be more consolidation in the Japanese semiconductor industry, and it looks as if there will be, then Toshiba would appear to be the most lkely consolidator.
Recent years have seen a proliferation of excellent new wireless standards. It wasn't always like this: Remember CT2? The ghastly Rabbit wireless standard backed by Ferranti? Now we have loads of good wireless standards. My thanks to Richard Wilson for suggestions for this one. The ten best wireless standards are:
Are all those figures showing China’s huge trade surplus real? A new US study reveals that, when a $300 Apple iPod is exported from China, where final assembly is carried out, the value is recorded in China’s export statistics as $144, but the actual value added in China is only $4.
It’s an interesting commentary on human nature to see the mix of affection and wariness in the attitude of Japan to Commodore Matthew Perry who sailed with four ships into Tokyo Bay on March 31st 1854 to the astonishment of the locals who had never seen steamships before.
Japan is to open up its wireless telecommunications network operator market to new carriers when it allocates licenses for 2.5GHz spectrum for Wimax services, later this year.
Who’d be a Prime Minister? Just as Tony Blair got the Good Riddance reaction when he went, the Japanese are currently delivering a similar response to the resignation of their prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
The Sharp-Pioneer tie-up, announced yesterday, and the purchase of Sanyo Semiconductor reported today, reflect a growing trend in Japan to look for amalgamations and restructurings in the technology industry. Another such deal, expected soon, is the merger of Sony Semiconductor with Toshiba.
Surrounded by paddy fields in the middle of Japan’s main island, Honshu, about 170 miles north of Tokyo, is NOR flash memory maker Spansion’s weapon for dominating the NOR flash market, a 300mm fab.
Charlie Sporck left Fairchild Semiconductor in 1967 to take over as CEO of National Semiconductor and become an industry legend. His impact on the company was pretty immediate as this press report, dated May 1969, observes:
For a nation which, to outsiders, looks as if it takes life very seriously, the Japanese can be gloriously eccentric.
Spansion’s Mirrorbit technology is the only competitive flash technology which will scale below 45nm, according to the company’s CEO Dr Bernard Cambou.
Four of these came from Intel: the first commercial MOS DRAM, the first EPROM, the first commercial EEPROM and MLC flash. The PROM had a major effect on the industry, hence the inclusion of the 5603 1K PROM. The other memopry chips had a profound effect on their markets at the time. The Mostek 16K DRAM, the Inmos 16K NMOS SRAM, the NEC 256K DRAM, the Toshiba 1Mbit DRAM set the standards for those product areas, and dominated their markets. So here are the ten best memory chips:
One of the nice things about arriving in Japan is that the bus which takes you from Narita airport to the Tokyo City Air Terminal (TCAT) in calls itself the ‘Friendly Limousine Bus’.
Freescale Semiconductor’s private equity owners, a consortium lead by Blackstone, are causing great distress to the 900 workers at the East Kilbride fab by refusing to answer any questions about their future.
The chickens are coming home to roost, nasties are emerging from the woodwork, and some esteemed bankers are looking like silly wankers.
Sharp has produced a display capable of acting as a keyboard for a laptop computer. What, one wonders, would such a laptop computer look like?
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, tells a hilarious story in his book, iWoz.
What happens when people talk about displays? Invariably up bubble hypey statements about OLEDs, Electrophorescents and FEDs. All of which, or each of which, we are invariably told, are the so-called ‘next mainstream display technology’.
What is it with Intel? Hard on the heels of it courting worldwide unpopularity by squaring up as a wrecker to MIT’s one-laptop-per-child (OLPC) programme, Intel has now got itself into a pissing match with India.
Autumn means the business traveling season starts up again, and it is becoming painfully clear that free WiFi access is becoming, like Alice’s Cheshire cat, a vanishing phenomenon.
Fabs have been getting bigger for a while, but to build, and equip, an 80,000 300mm wafer a month fab, as Toshiba and SanDisk have just done, is truly awesome, especially when it’s dedicated to one product: NAND flash.
Very many thanks to Ian Dedic for the suggestions here. Below are the ten best analogue chips.
In February 1972, describing the construction of an MOS IC for use in an electronic calculator at the company’s fab in Glenrothes, Dr Stephen Forte, joint managing director of General Instruments Microelectronics, said that two miles of paper tape were consumed during the design of the chip.
‘A new system to be installed in the near future will use tape cassettes for the input and storage of design data’, says an Electronics Weekly report.
‘This will allow, for example, data for each layer of a complex IC to be held on one cassette’, says the report.
TOMORROW MORNING: The Ten Best Analogue Chips
I slept last night in a former monastery in the middle of a lake near Munich, courtesy of Sharp, who hold an annual forum there.
Could Google’s GPhone be a Wimax/WiFi/3G/GSM phone|? After all, the GPhone needs GSM to be useful, 3G to be future-proof, Wimax to complement Google’s alliance with Sprint, and WiFi because, sometimes, it's free.
Despite the proliferation of wireless standards, wireless communications is not going to make it as an in-car communications medium, according to BMW.
The late Bernie Vonderschmitt, the founding CEO of Xilinx, used to tell a good yarn about how he would recruit people to the company.
The Japanese semiconductor industry is all a-flutter as it appears that one of their number is to be taken over by a private equity company.
“Custom masked ROMs are heading for trouble”, Intersil’s marketing manager, Colin Kidd, was quoted as saying in February 1972, “by next year, the market will have grown to the point where some five semiconductor manufacturers will each need to ship around 100 different ROM patterns a week – and that’s without reckoning programme changes, errors and so on. The costs and delays are going to be horrifying. Everything therefore points to the electrical programming of units – in the field if necessary.”
Surprise, surprise, Intersil was introducing a 1K PROM.
TOMMORROW MORNING: THE TEN BEST LOGIC CHIPS
It seems that the manufacturers of mobile phones are beginning to take over from the wireless operators in getting consumers to buy services over the wireless networks.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and the lining on the credit crunch cloud could be a boost for venture capital.
Some of these are product types made by various manufacturers, others were proprietary developments. Here are the ten best logic chips.
What do management do when they haven’t got a clue? Answer: They announce a re-org. Samsung Electronics managers seem to be no different to managers elsewhere in the world. Last week, after a summer of dramas including slipping profits, bombed-out DRAM prices, a fizzled-out non-bid by US corporate raider Carl Icahn, and the mysterious, as yet unexplained, power outage at a DRAM plant, Samsung management announced a re-org.
So here we are, two months into the second half of the year when things should get better. Poor results in the first half are traditionally spiced with the prediction that things will turn up in the second. As STMicroelectronics’ chief economist, Jean-Philippe Dauvin says: “I wish I could always live in the second half of the year.”
Some interesting comments came in from the US about the how the wireless scene looks over there. Apparently the cognoscenti are writing off UMTS and HSDPA because of lack of bandwidth (theoretical capacity 2Mbps, but 768Kbps in the real world, with 1.5Mbps bursts). So, while LTE might boost the technology in 2010, it’s going nowhere at the moment.
Went to a wedding at the weekend. One of those modern affairs where the bride and groom have lived together for eight years and have three children.
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