January 2008 Archives

In 1981, when Siemens Semiconductor brought out its 64K DRAM, it was four years behind the Americans - then the best makers of memory in the world.

Europe’s share of worldwide chip markets has fallen below the level which, in 1983, triggered the thinking behind the Megaproject which, followed by JESSI and MEDEA, allowed Europe to catch up with the US and Japan in chip technology.

Fancy a punt? Rambus shares, now at $16, could soar to $100, or fall to $5, depending on which way a judge decides a court case next month.

Thanks to iSuppli for this one. Here are the companies in the Top 20 of the iSuppli league table which grew fastest last year.

As conventional microelectronics wrestles with the problem of leakage, which has ended one of the benefits of shrinking – the automatic reduction in power - the hope is that new ways of manipulating atoms and molecules will permit the further scaling of electronic devices.

Nokia has whipped past the 40 per cent market share point, selling 437 million phones last year, which is almost as much as the combined total of its four biggest rivals, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG.

Powerchip Semiconductor of Taiwan, the world’s sixth largest DRAM manufacturer, has joined up with the Belgium-based IMEC DRAM R&D consortium, which is the leading world centre for core DRAM technology development.

The World Economic Forum in Davos was the venue for the launch of a survey of the private equity business by the Harvard Business School. It concludes that private equity takeovers don’t have much effect on the companies they buy.

Jorma Ollila was the legendary CEO of Nokia who transformed it from a TV, logging and runbber boots company into the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones.

Are Americans more gullible than the rest of the world? It seems that all the rumours that AMD and IBM will merge have come out of the US, while those who think the idea daft are non-Americans.

The news that one third of all XBox360s is a dud, raises the question: Could it be that the US revival in consumer electronics will fizzle out because of shitty manufacturing?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course, but, for a couple of quarters now, the boss of STMicroelectronics, Carlo Bozotti, has been blaming ST’s poor financial results on the weak dollar.

Twenty-one rum punches is the record knocked back in one session at the Mullins beach bar on the West coast of Barbados.

These are not the CEOs of the ten best performing semiconductor companies of 2007, but they are the ten who did most for the future of their companies.

The responsibility for the financial crisis falls on investment bankers, described as 'lobotomised sharks', who poured money into sub-prime mortgages and over-priced private equity deals in the run up to the start of the crisis last year.

Change is the winning political formula according to Gordon, Hillary, Barack, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt, Rudy and David Thompson. David who?

Fujitsu’s decision to spin off its semiconductor became inevitable as its options for future technology development and manufacturing capability started to close.

Hob-nobbing with Gordon Brown and Sir Richard Branson's trade mission to China, and scoffing a State Banquet in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last week, was Guillaume d’Eyssautier, CEO of PicoChip, who was in the country to announce the first PicoChip product to be developed entirely in China.

The ‘Asian Contagion’ of 1997-8, which led to a massive bail-out of several Asian economies by the IMF, coincided with a collapse in DRAM prices. The feisty Dr Ulrich Schumacher, formerly CEO of Siemens Semiconductors which became Infineon Technologies, and now CEO of Grace Semiconductor, was furious at what he saw as the propping up of a rival in the DRAM business by IMF money.

NXP Semiconductor reckons that GPS in cellphones is going to be a very big deal That’s why it bought fabless semiconductor GPS specialist company, GloNav, last month.

Electronics Weekly’s issue of Feb 23 1972 has a story starting: ‘Britain seems to be at last waking up to the fact that its cable television operators, who now turn over a lively £15 million a year by piping TV programmes to nearly two million homes, hold the keys to what could be a vast national information grid, capable of supplying a whole host of specialised services from facsimile newspapers to community television’.

Maybe Intel’s miserable spat with the OLPC has had some good results, the world is now focussed on low-cost laptops.

Tom Perkins, partner in Silicon Valley venture capitalists Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, recounts a wistful tale in his book Valley Boy.

Sometime this year, the number of active mobile phones in the world will reach three billion out of a world population of six and a half billion people.The wireless industry has been built on a series of key steps of which the first took place in London, one year after the death of George IV.

Maybe the US government won’t get as much as it was hoping to from this month’s auction of spectrum, which was expected to see non-traditional telecoms players like Google, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, get into the wireless telecoms business.

Mistaking a silicon wafer in a box for a used pizza might have helped one promising chip company into the knacker’s yard.

For the developers of wireless technology the key questions are: What should we be putting in the mix? What connections do people want?

Electronics Weekly’s issue of November 29th 1972 reports the presentation of the MacRobert Award, described as the ‘Nobel Prize of Engineering’ to Godfrey Hounsfield of EMI for inventing the X-ray scanner.

“My idea was that as soon as I graduated, I would become a designer in a major company”, recalls Pistorio, “I looked at Olivetti, the most important electronic company in Italy, at Siemens and at Marelli - they were all looking for engineers. Demand was far outstripping the offers. Every graduate was getting 20 invitations for interview. I had ten interviews and got ten offers.”

According to semiconductor industry folk-lore this should be a very good year for the chip industry.

It took Apple to teach him Windows-based computing, Yahoo to introduce him to browsers, Google to show him the power of search, and the iPhone to teach him the joys of touch sensitive control.

The news from CES 2008 that Intel is to try its hand again at mobile telecoms and consumer chips leads one to ask the question: Can Intel succeed in markets where it doesn’t have a monopoly?

In a revealing insight into Qualcomm’s integrity, a US judge has asked the California Bar Association to investigate the conduct of six Qualcomm lawyers after behaviour, described by the judge, as ‘exceptional misconduct’.

There's never been anyone like Edison with his 1,093 patents and his 'Invention Factory' in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he boasted he would invent something minor every ten days and a 'Big Trick' every six months. Here are Edison's ten best Big Tricks:

The more satellites put up for global positioning, the faster it will be to get to the first fix. This will be the major benefit for positioning of adding the European GALILEO constellation and, once repaired, the Russian GLONASS constellation, to the American GPS constellation.

Could 2008 be the year when nanotechnology starts to impact on the semiconductor industry?

First joining, then ditching, MIT’s One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) project aiming at giving a laptop to one billion of the world’s poorest children suggests that Intel, like Rhett Butler, no longer gives a damn.

Following the 1968 takeover of English Electric by Lord Arnold Weinstock’s GEC, the Marconi-Elliott Microelectronics Witham operation has been split into four mini-empires with each empire headed up by a product manager responsible for his own diffusion, R&D, production, sales, promotion, and profitability.

The greatest businessman who the late Bernie Vonderschmitt, founder of Xilinx, ever knew, was David Sarnoff. One of the many things Sarnoff taught Vonderschmitt was the importance of seeding a new market by making technology affordable.

Good news about that perky little Asus Eee, is that its manufacturer is inviting visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show next week to ‘join ASUS, Intel and Sprint to learn about the state of Wimax technology, preview next-generation mobile solutions (including the next generation Eee PC)’.

The legal battles between Broadcom and Qualcomm look like rumbling on through 2008,
while Qualcomm struggles to find takers for its UMB 4G technology.

It seems that the Wassenaar Arrangement, aimed at restricting high technology transfers to China, has been quietly subverted by the US administration with the announcement that IBM is to transfer bulk CMOS 45nm manufacturing technology to the mainland China foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

The deal announced last May to merge the loss-making NOR flash divisions of Intel and STMicroelectronics wasn’t as tightly sewn up as it might have been.

From Faraday's 1833 discovery that increasing heat can increase conductivity in silver sulphide, the reverse of the normal effect of heat on conductors, to Bell Labs' 1947 invention of the transistor, were a series of all-important discoveries which made the transistor possible. Interestingly, six of the ten discoveries were made in the 19th century.