February 2008 Archives

Sir Robin Saxby, first CEO of ARM, reckons that interviewing new recruits for the company was one of the most important tasks he had to master.

Two of Gartner Dataquest’s predictions for the next four years could be feed off eachother: first, that Apple will double its unit market share in the US and Europe by 2011, and second, that half of all travelling workers will leave their laptops at home in favour of other devices by 2012.

“After reaching their lowest low ever during the recession, the semiconductor manufacturers producing TTL devices have now had the pendulum swinging the other way,” wrote Electronics Weekly in its Sept 27th 1972 edition.

When Gordon Brown skinned the UK wireless operators in 2000, collecting £22.5 billion for 3G licences, the credit was given to a clever auction system in which bidders bid blind, and kept on bidding until they could bid no more.

Believe it or not, China is said to be about to announce its 3G licences. This has been expected for about three years now. State radio is saying that the restructuring of the country’s telecoms industry might be announced in the next few weeks.

Thanks to Computing in Science and Engineering for this one. Here are the ten best algorithms:

The US auction of 700MHz spectrum, which could see a new, nationwide wireless telecommunications player (possibly Google) emerge, is still continuing after three weeks and 100 rounds of bidding.

In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove, co-founder, former CEO, now Chairman Emeritus of Intel, tells how he figured out at an interview whether the interviewee could solve problems.

According to Business Week, Motorola can’t get any interest in its cellphone division from potential trade buyers, so the only route open to Motorola is to spruce up the business to make it more valuable. Currently analysts are valuing it at $8 billion but, as its market share declines, so does the business’ value.

Nowadays Toshiba is known for NAND flash, but it wasn’t always so. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor in the 1980s and 1990s, tells how the company once grabbed half the worldwide DRAM market.

The dread day dawns. Earlier this week I go to work to find the one thing everyone dreads has happened, our chunk of the company has been put up for sale.

Earlier this week I was banging on about how Qualcomm’s extortionate and litigious attitude to royalty charges on CDMA had queered its chances of getting its 4G technology platform accepted.

‘With the announcement of Texas Instruments’ first family of medium-scale integrated circuits, the giant has stirred at last’, starts a story in the October 29th 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Someone calling himself Paul Otellini has responded somewhat unfavourably to a report carried by Barron’s that Goldman Sachs has taken Intel off its ‘Conviction Buy List’.

Qualcomm blew its chance of getting its 4G technology Ultra-Mobile Broadband (UMB) accepted by the telecoms industry by being too greedy at the 3G generation.

The Mobile World Congress, though a wonderful party, showed an industry which is not, apparently, up to anything particularly innovative. The ten best products at the 2008 show in Barcelona last week were:

Or indeed: Whether Wimax? The next week or so is expected to throw up the answer as to whether the US will deploy Wimax in a significant way.

If you go onto the Web-site of Montalvo Systems and click the ‘About Us’ button you read: ‘Montalvo Systems is a well funded fabless semiconductor start-up funded by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms’.

A measure of the challenge which Rich Beyer has taken up in becoming the new CEO of Freescale, is described by the ratings agency Fitch.

Ulrich Schumacher, later CEO of Siemens Semiconductors which became Infineon Technologies, and now CEO of Grace Semiconductor, joined Siemens as his first job after gaining his PhD.

“As long ago as 1960, I listened to a well-respected engineer confidently forecast that 150-watt HF power transistors at prices comparable to valves of equivalent dissipation were but two years or so distant”, wrote Pat Hawker in the October 25th 1972 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Having Rich Beyer taking over as CEO of Freescale, could be good news for Freescale's IC designers. Beyer has a record of liking designers and rewarding them well.

The semiconductor industry is as anarchic, unpredictable and volatile as it ever was, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, told the recent IFS2008

One of the funniest of yarns is told by the American Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman about his first day at graduate school at Princeton University when the Dean invited him for tea.

You have to laugh. First we get Micron CEO Steve Appleton saying that low DRAM prices are a jolly good thing because they’ll drive necessary consolidation in the DRAM industry; then we get the German and EU authorities giving Qimonda a 165 million euro subsidy to build a DRAM fab in Saxony; then we find memory distributors Kingston offering a $40 rebate on a $40 memory card.

It’s surprising that there still are ten DRAM producers after all the consolidation there’s been in this industry sector, but there are, actually, more than ten DRAM manufacturers and, what’s more, the non-top ten had collective revenues of $428 million last year in a market worth $31.5 billion. Here are the ten largest, with their 2007 revenues, as reported by iSuppli:

Sometimes, something comes along which shows you just how awful the tech collapse of 2001 was.

In 2004, ARM paid nearly a billion dollars for the physical IP company Artisan. Many people said at the time that ARM had overpaid for a company with revenues of $82m.

Did Michel Mayer dig his heels in at Freescale? One wonders whether the private equity owners of Freescale were pushing him to take measures which he could not stomach.

“Around 1999 to 2000 we talked to venture capitalists”, recalls Hal Philipp, who sold his company, Quantum Research, for $88 million to Atmel last week, “they said to us: ‘You’re not internet; you’re not telecoms; you’re nothing.’ Then they offered us £100,000 for half the business. It was appalling really.”

Today Bookham is a much diminshed entity than it was in its turn-of-the-century glory days. Then, founder Andrew Rickman developed a new manufacturing process for optical chips, IPO'd in 2000, and immediately entered the FTSE 100. He has an idiosyncratic view of how to build a company:

The sudden change in the fortunes of the private equity industry have left the industry having to do what it doesn’t like to do – manage its acquisitions for the long-term.

The credit crunch has not, it seems, quenched the ardour of NEC Electronics’ stalker, the US hedge fund Perry Capital.

4G could change everything in the cellular infrastructure industry, as new technology suppliers, implementing new standards, enable new equipment suppliers.

“It brings up the world to its knees, and it's not even on the balance sheet”, said Malcolm Penn, CEO of analysts Future Horizons, talking at IFS2008 about the debt binge which is bedevilling hopes of economic expansion this year.

Thanks to Future Horizons, Europe's leading chip industry analyst company, for this one. These are expected to be the fastest growing markets for chips between 2007 and 2012.

Fashion is a funny thing. Apparently the Koreans have gone all woozy about the comic-strip type art of Roy Lichtentstein.

One of the semiconductor industry's legendary CEOs, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, who led Toshiba in the 1980s and 90s, makes some charming observations about the nature of the chip business in his book 'Chip Management'.

The DRAM industry has always been barking mad, but Q4 showed it in one of its spectacularly potty spasms.

Under the headline: 'Cathode Ray Tube's Rivals Demonstrated', a front page story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of October 25th 1972 starts off: ‘The first commercial versions of Control Data Corp’s plasma display, the flat display panel which promises to rival the cathode ray tube in many alpha-numeric and graphic display applications, were demonstrated in London last week.’

The biggest backer of Memec when it was founded in 1974 was Werner Stolz, inventor of the Stolz PROM programmer. He tells an interesting tale of how he got to be involved in the founding on Memec.

The US National Law Review carries an article about the recent Qualcomm court debacle. The authors, two trial lawyers who are partners in the Chicago law firm of Jenner and Block, warn other lawyers: “Tell the judge the truth ......”.