Julius Blank, who worked at Shockley Semiconductor before co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor, tells how he and Eugene Kleiner, another Fairchild co-founder and founding partner of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, came to join Shockley's infant semiconductor operation
What will the EU do with the expected gynormous fine on Intel for flouting anti-trust law in
Proof, if further proof were needed, that the Infineon supervisory board has gone barking mad, is that it appears to have abolished the CEO position and named Peter Bauer, the successor to outgoing CEO Dr Wolfgang Ziebart, 'Spokesman of the Management Board'.
Wolfgang Ziebart's parting gift to Infineon, as he prepares to depart as CEO at the end of the week, appears to be a notable coup in securing Infineon's position as a supplier to Samsung, the world's second largest supplier of mobile phones.
It is absurd to think that any maker of mobile phones would use an Intel processor chip. It might if Intel sold the processor as a core, but any phone manufacturer using discrete Intel processors would be an idiot.
Thanks to a combination of STMicroelectronics and iSuppli for this one which takes account of the new look to the market since ST and NXP pooled their wireless chip operations into a $3 billion revenue joint venture taking the No.3 slot in the wireless industry's rankings. That deal is expected to close in Q308. Assuming it does, here, with their market shares of the total market, are the wireless chip company rankings:
Leaks from the European Commission in
Wolfgang Ziebart has been ousted as the CEO of Infineon after disagreeing with the supervisory board of the company about strategic direction. Peter Bauer, a management board member, takes over.
According to rumours in the German press Infineon's CEO Wolfgang Ziebart will be ousted by Saturday, KKR is to take a 40-50 per cent stake in Infineon, and NXP will be sold to Infineon.
Most of us look back on life and realise we've been very lucky on occasions, even if we didn't recognise it at the time. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, the former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, is no exception.
It was good to hear the Director General for Competition at the European Commission, Philip Lowe, come out strongly at this week's Reuters conference in Paris against companies which unfairly use their patent positions to impose onerous licensing fees on the industry.
According to Lowe, companies should disclose: "Not just the technical parameters, but also the subsequent cost of licensing necessary to implement the standard."
Gated communities seem to me to be a good idea. The only problem with them is that they are currently self-selecting.
Something pretty amazing seems to be happening in the semiconductor equipment industry, it's no longer dependent on selling equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, and appears to be getting less so.
Thanks to VLSI Research for this one; the ten largest suppliers of critical sub-systems to the chip, flat panel and data storage manufacturers showing the emergence of photovoltaic suppliers as a "key opportunity for sub-systems suppliers," according to VLSI's John West.. Some chip manufacturing equipment OEMs derive 25 per cent of their revenues from photovoltaics.
Hungary is to start production of colour television sets. Plans are underway at the United Incandescent Lamp Factory in Budapest to set manufacture in motion, following the experimental start of colour transmission last March using the Secam system.
So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's issue of May 28 1969.
The smartest thing about being in the wireless business is knowing when to get out of it. Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) must be wondering what it can do next.
That was the headline of the cover story in the April 1st 1986 internal Intel newsletter during the worst hit the US semiconductor industry ever took, losing 27,000 jobs, 13 per cent of the electronics jobs in Silicon Valley and $2 billion in earnings in two years.
Apologies for rather erratic posting over the last few days due to a move to a new version of the posting software.
The software appears to be stable and understandable and, hopefully, the normal schedule of 7am and 3pm posts will be resumed.
Innovation has to return to the semiconductor industry at the transistor level rather than the exploitation of the massive transistor counts made possible by modern scaling, according to Andy Rappaport General Partner at August Capital.
Rappaport, who has invested in Actel, Atheros Genoa, MMC Networks, Silicon Architects (acquired by Synopsys) Silicon Image, Viewlogic and Transmeta has not invested in any start-up that proposed using 90nm or 65nm processes.
"The share of companies that will choose to develop very large chips will have to fall, if bulk transistor utilisation is expensive relative to value, marginal transistor improvement can be hugely valuable relative to cost," says Rappaport, who founded The Technology Research Group (TRG), and used to be an editor at EDN, a sister magazine to Electronics Weekly.
To put it another way, Rappaport says: "Lack of easy scaling makes clever scaling really important."
In an era when the semiconductor industry is forming more alliances than at any time in its history, many of which are international alliances, it is salutary to turn to one of Japan's great CEOs, Tsuyoshi Kwanishi, formerly CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, who set out in his book, Chip Management, ten rules for forming alliances.
Kawanishi formed notable international alliances in his time at Toshiba - e.g. with Siemens Semiconductor, later extended to Siemens, IBM and Motorola. His ten rules are:
The glories of England are its history, countryside and pubs. If you want to wake up to one of England's most wonderful views stretching thirty miles across the Somerset Levels, where Alfred burnt the cakes, to Glastonbury Tor and the Mendip Hills, set within striking distance of some of England's best pubs, then book a brand new, rural self catering apartment at http://www.farmyardretreat.co.uk
The question reverberating around the chip industry is: Can Intel compete in a market of which it only owns 10 per cent of the customers' customer base?
I needn’t have bothered going to the Dubai desert to find out about the 3G iPhone. Popping down my local High Street produced the same result. The 3G version is out next month in Europe and, in the UK, O2 will handle it.
In the Dubai desert, a group of semiconductor industry glitterati throw off their suits after the first day of the International Electronics Forum 2008 and and form a blues group.
When the immigration officer leans back in his chair with a bit of a smile and you say Hullo and he says Hullo and, without another word, stamps your passport and hands it back, you know you’re entering a civilized country. So it was coming to Dubai last week.
Intel’s decision to exit the semiconductor memory business, is usually attributed to a conversation between former CEOs Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. But Grove, in his book Only The Paranoid Survive, lays the credit elsewhere.
Apple’s coyness in refusing to reveal whether the iPhone it is launching in ten countries shortly is in fact the 3G iPhone has been a waste of time. Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) revealed that it is the 3G version of the iPhone which it is going to launch in Italy next month.
The reason why Samsung, Intel and TSMC announced last week that they were combining to push 450mm wafer manufacturing technology is because no one else wants it, according to Dr Mark Pinto, executive vice president and CTO of Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor production equipment.
Satellites casting all communications barriers aside, and making television and radio available to the world’s most inaccessible settlements are about to become a reality, according to Mr Fred Adler of the Hughes Aircraft Company, who presented the main lecture at the 6th International Television Exhibition and Symposium in Montreux last week.
Apple seems to have become paranoid about its foreign iPhone sales. Yesterday, Vodafone announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten countries: Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Portugal, Egypt, India, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.
My thanks to Dr Dwight Decker, chairman of Conexant and the Global Semiconductor Alliance for this one. Here are the ten best reasons not to be engaged in the semiconductor industry:
It’s funny to see Intel, TSMC and Samsung saying they want 450mm wafer manufacturing. Wouldn’t any device manufacturer? The question is: Will Samsung, Intel and TSMC pay for it?
A great semiconductor company has a culture, and that culture usually comes from one person. At Intel it came from co-founder Bob Noyce who, as the son of a non-conformist Minister, respected excellence and loathed hierarchy.
A re-spin is nowadays considered a disaster when a 90nm mask costs half a million, and a 65nm mask over a million, and when three months lost time to market is supposed to lose you 30 per cent of the potential revenues.
April was an excellent month for new memory technologies. First we get IBM saying its Racetrack technology can increase memory density by ten times; then we get Glasgow University saying they can make a molecular switch which could implement a Petabyte memory on a square inch substrate; then Manchester University says it’s made a transistor one atom thick and ten atoms wide out of graphene; Duke University, using a masking technique, makes the highest density cluster of carbon nanotubes ever achieved - ten nanotubes a few atoms thick, and then H-P comes up with its ‘memristor’, a resistor with storage capabilities which could be used in FPGAs and for ultra-low power memory.
The UK semiconductor industry has never been in better shape. With start-ups like Icera, picoChip and XMOS it is better placed to grow major new companies based on UK technology than it has ever been.
‘To ease their customers through the pangs of decimalisation, ICL are offering them file conversion programmes’, begins a story in Electronics Weekly’s issue of May 28th 1969.
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