April 2008 Archives

Dear old Bozotti. Like a gramophone record which has got stuck, the boss of STMicroelectronics has blamed the dollar for poor results for the third quarter in a row.

Thanks to the FT for this one. The ten biggest US high-tech spenders on R&D, measured in billions of US dollars, are:

Ever since we saw Bernie Ecclestone try and bribe Tony Blair over cigarette advertising at Formula One meetings we’ve known that New Labour is corruptible. Cash for Honours confirmed it.

“The industry needs a new transistor, a new device”, reckons Dr Dwight Decker, Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and Chairman of Conexant, “we’ve been lucky to put it off for 20 years. We need something to reduce the cost of manufacturing dramatically, maybe a completely new material.”

Hillary Clinton is making an impact on the semiconductor industry. Her ‘No Quitting’ stance has spread to Intel CEO Paul Otellini who, almost unbelievably, says Intel is still trying to get into the cellphone business.

Well it’s Monday morning again and, if you want something to make the world seem a better place, read Gene Wilder’s new novel: ‘The Woman Who Wouldn’t’.

Akio Morita was born into a wealthy family which regularly bought all the latest electric gadgets. His father’s purchase of an electric phonograph triggered his interest in electrical things.

Another week, another semiconductor joint venture. This week we’ve had MeiYa Technology, the new DRAM joint venture between Micron and Nanya. Last week we had the NXP-STMicroelectronics wireless joint venture. Another half a dozen DRAM companies are talking about joint ventures. Why are JVs so popular?

The Suckers’ Phone, a.k.a the original 3G-less iPhone, was a total flop in Europe, according to the blog of Guy Kewney.

IP is becoming a joke in the semiconductor industry with ‘patent trolls’ trying to gouge royalties by claiming the infringement of dubiously relevant patents.

If ever there was a miserable story in the history of the semiconductor industry, it is the story of Rambus.

Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, legendary former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, quotes, in his book Chip Management, ten symptoms of Big Company Disease, as compiled by Professor Yoshiya Teramoto of Meiji Gakuin University.

“We shall never be able to practise medicine in the future, without exploiting some kinds of magnetic storage device,” said Dr Paul Hall, of the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, in a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of May 28 1969.

Why is NXP putting its wireless business into a joint venture with STMicroelectronics, rather than selling the business outright?

It was shocking to hear Dr Dwight Decker, Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and Chaiorman of Conexant, say that the financial institutions are holding back innovation in the semiconductor industry.

After nearly three weeks in America I’m asked what was the best bit, and it has to be breakfast at Kokomo's Surfside Grill on Huntington Beach.

Is Qualcomm throwing down the gauntlet to the world’s wireless industry on 4G?

If only they could speed up the development of all this carbon nanotube, molecular switching, graphene transistor technology.

Could Taiwan, Intel’s most fervent collaborator over the years, be preparing a second challenge to Intel’s x86 monopoly?

A good laugh is to be had from three USA government guys moaning that Google manipulated the recent 700MHz spectrum auction.

At yesterday’s results meeting, Intel CEO Paul Otellini gave his clearest hint yet that he’s considering dumping Intel’s stake in the IM Flash joint venture with Micron Technology.

Andy Grove, former CEO and chairman of Intel, wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive in which he promoted the idea of inflection points, times when companies have to respond to change or die.

Thanks to VLSI Research for this one. Here are the top ten, measured by revenue, semiconductor production equipment manufacturing companies in the world.

Today XMOS announces the sampling of its first chip, a four core chip, with each core delivering 400MIPS, selling for $10 in volume.

In the first five months of this year, the Glenrothes plant of Marconi-Elliott Microelectronics has produced the same number of DTL ICs as they produced in the whole of 1968, and it is expected that this operation will become profitable this year.

The Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara in a 1989 book co-authored with Sony co-founder Akio Morita called ‘The Japan that can say No’, recalls how Cabinet Ministers found a discussion on the competitiveness of industry so boring that many members appeared to fall asleep.

The wireless business must be horrible. First, they say Freescale will flog its wireless business, then NXP flogs off its wireless business to STMicroelectronics.

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, the most famous of all the Silicon Valley venture capital firms, got off to a rocky start, according to co-founder Tom Perkins in his book Valley Boy.

"The shared memory approach of Intel and AMD to general purpose multi-core processing is like building Hadrian’s Wall with 100 builders spread between Newcastle and Carlisle with one guy with a wheelbarrow delivering the bricks”, says Peter Robertson, managing director of Edinburgh multi-processing company 3L.

Periodically the semiconductor industry likes to beat itself up and pronounce its inadequacies, but there are usually self-serving reasons for it.

It’s been a long time getting out on the market, but at last it’s here. Toshiba announced it’s putting a version of the Cell microprocessor on the market.

The resignation of Toshihiko Ono from Fujitsu is quite amazing. Ono is a really good bloke who made a great job of running Fujitsu's semiconductor division, or Electronic Devices Group as they call it, then left to take up a corporate job planning product strategy for Fujitsu’s systems products.

Pretty subjective stuff this but, I reckon, these are the ten best mobile phones ever built.

Coming back from the US to T5 on Sunday was awful beyond awful. We were three hours late leaving San Francisco, had to circle for 40 minutes before landing at Heathrow and, when we landed, the captain said: “We’ve landed at Heathrow which is in chaos”.

Intel doesn’t do diversifications. Everyone knows that. Now and again it tries one, just for fun, a bit of video conferencing, ASICs, consumer products, wireless chips, a stab at NAND flash, but it soon pulls out to show that it’s only teasing.

Why have we been led constantly to expect that consumer fuel cells are an imminent proposition?

It’s Monday morning, and a laugh is in order, and a Swiss bank going bust is good for a laugh.

Nowadays we are accustomed to semiconductor start-up chip companies delivering pretty incremental advantages in price/performance, but it wasn’t always like that, as the chip industry’s greatest name, Gordon Moore, recalls when recounting the story of the founding of Intel in 1968.

God I love San Francisco. The first time I came was in 1984, and I’ve been every year since and always have a good time. Kicking off at the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness and Washington, a tawny, panelled place like Simpson’s or Rules in London, things started well.

What constitutes being brave at the semiconductor conference? Predicting the return of bubble memory? Projecting that FRAM will become the main memory device? Or predicting that direct write e-beam will bring about a resurgence in ASIC?

Here in San Francisco it’s a bit depressing to hear people say that the old magic mix of Silicon Valley, the mix of money, technology and entrepreneurs, is losing its potency.

Here in San Francisco at the Globalpress conference it became pretty clear that Wimax, in the US, is a dead duck.

Here they are: the ten best EDA companies in an industry which, apart from the top four, remains fragmented.

Colour TVs stole most of the limelight at last week’s radio and TV shows with manufacturers making an all out attempt to get sales moving against the tide of credit restrictions and somewhat alarming customer disinterest. That’s how a story starts in Electronics Weekly’s edition of September 3rd 1969.

In his book SPINOFF, Charlie Sporck, former CEO of National Semiconductor interviews both Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and Jerry Sanders, former CEO of AMD, about Intel’s decision to go sole-source on the 386.