What comes after silicon and who will make it? Almost certainly the Americans will make it as US companies like IBM and Nantero of Boston appear to be leading the way in getting tangible results from research into graphene and carbon nanotubes as alternatives to silicon.
"Hey this was built when you Brits were conquering the world", was the greeting on the deck of the Old Queen Mary, reminding me, four hours after getting into LAX, that I was back in the land of cheery greetings from total strangers. It bucked me up.
Hans Snook is the most successful and colourful of all the wireless telecommunications entrepreneurs.
Vodafone expects to be deploying femtocells in its network, on a commercial basis, this year. Femtocells are low-cost basestations for 3G access, which are installed inside a home or an office to improve coverage and data rates.
“As expected, the Post Office has been quick to react to acoustic coupling for use in data transmission and has drawn up ‘detailed standards to guide designers of this kind of apparatus’,” reads a story in Electronics Weekly’s issue of September 3rd 1969.
Nine 300mm volume fabs will begin operation in 2008, and twelve new volume fabs are expected to start construction this year, according to SEMI the equipment manufacturers’ trade body.
Double patterning looks like being the lithography tool of choice at 32nm, but how do you absorb the inevitable extra costs of a double lithography process?
OLEDs have not turned out to be the storming replacement to TFT they were once cracked up to be with a market hovering around the billion dollar mark. Here are the ten best manufacturers:
Two years since the first integrated circuits became available from Mullard’s Southampton facility, the groundwork for a ‘Ford type’ mass production unit has been built round that pilot installation. So starts a story in Electronics Weekly’s issue of September 24th 1969.
Earlier this month, a report by Matt Lewis of the telecoms analyst company, ARCchart concluded that UMB, the 4G telecommunications standard proposed by Qualcomm, is unlikely to see the light of day.
“Fairchild Semiconductors are taking significant steps to build up their marketing operations in Britain following their June announcement of their entry into the UK”, is how the lead story opens on Electronics Weekly’s front page of September 3rd 1969.
IP is becoming an increasingly divisive issue in the semiconductor industry with companies like Nokia and Qualcomm spending around $200 million each, every year, on lawyers to protect themselves from patent claims, or try to enforce patent claims on others.
Why do you sell a share for $20 which you’ve just bought for $19? Answer: Because you’re exercising a stock option which is about to expire.
Here are the world's ten best manufacturers of mobile phones:
'Boeing Didn’t Invent The Aeroplane'
Is the title of an ad running in Electronics Weekly’s edition of September 24 1969.
One would have thought that the idea of merging Europe’s Big Three semiconductor companies would have been put to bed forever, but last week it surfaced again with a proposal for a three-way merger made by an ex-ST guy to the new fun-loving French president.
Rich Beyer starts today as CEO of Freescale Semiconductor and he seems to have kicked off on the right foot.
Wimax could be killed off by a report from the Satellite Users Interference Reduction Group (SUIRG) whjich states that Wimax interferes with satellite signals transmitted in the C-band frequency.
The Wagon Wheel was the Mountain View bar where Silicon Valley met, drank, gossiped, exchanged information, found new jobs and new hires and generally socialized in the pioneering days of the silicon frontier when new companies were springing up like mushrooms
It must be hellish being a CEO these days. You can’t swan around bathed in glory when you’ve got stock market analysts snapping at your heels telling you they won’t recommend people to buy your shares unless you do what they say.
Private equity companies are ‘staring into the jaws of hell’ according to US junk bond expert, Martin Fridson of FridsonVision, reported in the New York Times this week.
“Microelectronics is not unrelated to nature. Of course, it is not a product of nature, but it is a product created by the natural creativity and inquisitiveness of man”, writes Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshina Semiconductor, in his book Chip Management..
There's an interesting comment on the NOR flash market at http://seekingalpha.com/article/68068-the-spansion-expansion pointing out that Spansion, the only NOR flash player using 300mm wafers, shortly to move to 45nm before its main rivals Samsung and Numopnyx, and with an inherently cheaper technology, is in an exceptionally strong position.
Intel’s plan for getting out of its hole in ramping up NAND at a time of plummeting prices is to move to high-density SSDs.
Thanks to WTC for this one. The top ten MEMS manufacturers, judged by revenues are:
The mysterious private equity firm Carlyle Group which made a cool three hundred million quid on Qinetiq shares, and which has former PM Sir John Major as European chairman, is apparently trying to save its affiliate, Carlyle Capital, from bankruptcy.
We could soon find out why the lawyers misled the court in the Broadcom vs Qualcomm case which turned on the question of whether any Qualcomm employee had sat on an industry standards-setting body.
Water remains the best liquid for immersion lithography is the conclusion of the recent SPIE Advanced Lithography conference in San Jose.
Years ago, living on Exmoor among ruggedly free-spirited hill farmers who saw it as a point of honour to get the better of all forms of authority, I witnessed a remarkable legal victory.
The ears of the proverbial fly on the wall of the Intel boardroom in Santa Clara are burning.
The glitterati of the semiconductor industry have turned out to be right and the glitterati of the private equity industry have turned out to be wrong about the swoop on the semiconductor industry by the private equity industry back in 2006.
Woz isn’t that impressed by the iPhone, it is reported by CNET, where the Apple co-founder expressed the view that it should have had 3G capability.
The much-to-be-welcomed trend to tiny cheap wireless laptops is strengthening, with Elonex launching a £99 machine to go after the £200 machine of Asus, and others coming from Gigabyte, Medion, Gecube, E-Lead and Clevo.
If the rumours are true that Crolles is to be revived as a great microelectronics R&D centre, then the decision by STMicroelectronics to invest heavily in the site, if confirmed will be magnificent news for European microelectronics capability.
This is a bit of a no-brainer because, except in the case of phase-change and MRAM which are included because of their promise, the others are chosen strictly on their pulling power in terms of dollars. Here they are, the ten best memory chips:
The Venetians now have LED displays, similar to those on the London Underground, to show the times when the public boats which ply their canals, the Vaporetti, are due to arrive.
Private equity companies will go to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) for their investment money and not bother about banks, Guy Hands, boss of private equity firm Terra Firma, told the ‘Super Return’ conference in Munich last week.
A story datelined New York in the September 27th issue of Electronics Weekly, reads: “Texas Instruments has resigned from the US Electronics Industries Association in a dispute over the Association’s inability to take a strong free trade stand.”
In 1980, Potter bought a company, named it Psion, and looked around for something for it to do
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