November 2007 Archives

According to a venerable English adage, Hungarians are the only people who can go into a revolving door behind you, and come out of it in front of you.

I wonder what Steve Jobs is thinking about the German court order forcing T-Mobile to sell unlocked i-Phones.

The MEDEA+ meeting in Budapest did the ritual bemoaning of the limited public spending which Europe bestows on its high-tech industries but, in some ways, companies are lucky to get any subsidies at all, if you look at some of their past behaviour.

Private equity is making lousy returns for its investors, according to a French Professor from the HEC business school in Paris, in a survey submitted to the European parliament last week.

Trawling around the antiseptic halls and corridors of the Novotel Congress Hotel in Budapest during the MEDEA+ conference, I learn that Europe gave up its microelectronics independence for a lousy $150m.

Thanks to the FT for this list which has been extracted from its list of the top R&D spenders. Two companies, IBM and Toshiba, are much more than just chip companies of course, but the largest share of their R&D budget goes to chip R&D. It interested me to see by how much TSMC lagged the top ten list. TSMC's R&D budget is only $450m. Here they are then, the world's largest spenders on chip R&D:

Here in Budapest for the MEDEA+ annual conference I reflect that it’s better to have dinner in a restaurant than an art gallery.

It’s a software world, according to the professor of computer science at Bristol University.

“By 1976, except for big data processing machines, no one will be designing in TTL.”

Gestating technology can be a very long process, and it’s interesting to see today’s announcement that Matsushita is putting the reconfigurable IC technology it acquired when it bought Elixent last year into a camcorder. It is the first commercial use of the technology.

It is not well known that, after being effectively ousted from Fairchild Semiconductor, and before he started AMD, Jerry Sanders III considered switching careers and becoming a car salesman, a travel agent, and an personmal manager in the entertainment business.

Spaghetti or Asparagus? NXP reckons we’re moving from spaghetti-like electronics systems design to asparagus-like systems design.

Chatting to a Qualcomm guy I was asking why it is that they remain at legal and commercial loggerheads with the world’s largest hand-set producer, in theory their best potential customer.

I finally get my hands on an Asus Eee solid state mini-laptop and a fine thing it is.

Anecdotal evidence from my local Carphone Warehouse suggests that UK iPhone sales have been stifled by the price.

Thanks to the Financial Times for this one. Here, from the FT’s review of the world’s biggest spenders on R&D, www.ft.com/r&d, are the top ten hi-tec R&D spending companies.

Holy Grails are two a penny in the chip business from the the universal memory chip to the universal translator processor, but one Holy Grail, the single chip mobile phone with software defined radios putting a dozen standards and numerous frequencies on a handset, could be with us next year.

The Electronics Weekly edition of January 26th 1972 reads: ‘Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven are investigating the possible use of magnetic bubbles as information carriers’.

The American nutter fringe is apparently gearing itself up for a political battle to stop Abu Dhabi-based investment group, the Mubadala Development Company, buying 8 per cent of AMD for $600m.

Memory technology still has the capacity to make your jaw drop, and the idea of a chip on which you can store five DVD-resolution movies is truly jaw-dropping.

In his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel chairman Andy Grove recalls how the 1994 ‘Pentium Flaw’ fiasco affected Intel employees.

After the orgy of excess come the hangovers, the bills, the recriminations and the insults. This week, a Tory MP called the credit rating agencies ‘an absolute shower’ and a private equity CEO called the bankers ‘whimpering dogs’.

The split between Sprint and Nextel which were putting together the world’s largest Wimax network in the US, is a blow for the future adoption of the technology, says Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP Semiconductor.

Here we are, five days after the UK launch of the iPhone, and none of its three vendors, O2, Apple and Carphone Warehouse, has released sales figures.

Not many people came out on the right side of a spat with Lord Arnold Weinstock, the long-time boss of GEC, but Memec, which became the world’s third largest distributor before it was sold to Avnet, recorded an honourable draw as Memec’s founding CEO, Dick Skipworth recalls.

Luke Collins has very kindly contributed his own Ten Worst Questions For The Chip Industry and, with many thanks to Luke, I reproduce them below:

Samsung’s shenanigans have reached a new height of hilarity as it transpired that the Chairman of the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption was one of the alleged recipients of bribes from Samsung’s slush fund, according to revelations disclosed by the Korean Catholic Priests' Association for Justice (CPAJ).

At last, someone has done something special with solid state discs, and people are already raving about it, although it will not become available until next year.

Do you have problems with the data rate of WiFi? Does WiFi’s range annoy you? Would you pay money to get an increase in either? Or both? Well I know I wouldn’t.

UK iPhone sales were lousy, according to anecdotal evidence (Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse did not issue sales figures) showing that the Brits aren’t suckers, and that greed can kill off the most promising project.

Signalling a cooling of Sprint Nextel’s enthusiasm for Wimax, the company has ended its agreement to share its $5bn proposed Wimax network with the network being built by Clearwire, the Intel, Motorola, Samsung-backed network operator set up by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw.

Are the Brits suckers? Today we find out. The iPhone hits stores at 6:02pm tonight. Who will pay £899 to buy and use an iPhone for a year?

In the issue of Electronics Weekly for February 26th 1969 is a story which starts: "This week is the tenth anniversary of the UK's software industry, and Vaughan Programming Services of Ware, Herts, who started it all, are thriving under the direction of Mrs A St Johnston."

Has Google been very clever with its GPhone strategy? Instead of a phone it’s produced an OS and hardware reference designs.

Are we out-sourcing brain-usage? Popping into my local Waterstones this afternoon after Ben Elton’s latest novel, I take a twirl around the shelves, don’t see it, so ask the lady on duty where I could find a copy.

The semiconductor industry has always had to ask itself tough questions, and the questions don't much change. Here are the ten worst.

Samsung is adding to the general gaiety of the industry with a string of outrageous allegations worthy of the Koreans’ moniker: ‘The Italians of Asia’.

Over the chip industry's history there have been an increasing number of R&D collaborations as the cost of developing the technology has become increasingly expensive. The ten most effective examples of these have been:

500 blogs and a year ago, the same week as last year's Electronica, Mannerisms started and thanks to everyone who’s hit on it.

A particularly interesting transition from the IP to the fabless model is the two year-old Edinburgh start-up Spiral Gateway, which has a C-programmable technology for image processors.

The money men always seem to want a new dream to tilt at and, with the evaporation of the private equity mirage, the next new dream is tech.

With all the whingeing and moaning coming out of the USA, as companies like Intel and Microsoft undergo anti-trust investigations in Europe, it's instructive to hear about the experience of a European company going through the US anti-trust mechanism. Interestingly, it was all completed satisfactorily, thanks to the good sense of certain high-tech US CEOs, one of whom was a former CEO of Intel.

Upek, the three year-old STMicroelectronics spin-off specialising in fingerprint sensors, is preparing to IPO after substantial revenue growth.

As in the UK, so in the US. VCs in both countries are up in arms about the near-doubling of the tax-rate they pay when they realise their investments.

When Sir John Fleming, inventor of the vacuum tube, was lecturing on wireless transmission at the UK’s most revered scientific lecture hall at the Royal Institution, it was agreed that a dramatic addition would be the live receipt of a radio-ed message from none other than Guglielmo Marconi.