June 2008 Archives

There's a curious yarn flying around today to the effect that Apple has designed  Intel's Atom processor into its iPhone.

Politicians come expensive in the US. According to the US magazine Forbes, Qualcomm spent $1.5m lobbying pols in Q1 2008.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mike Moritz has given £25 million to his old Oxford College, Christ Church.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Silicon Valley's premier venture capital company, nearly lost its entire initial fund before it had made a single investment.

Nothing could be a more significant pointer to the importance STMicroelectronics puts on its new wireless joint venture with NXP, called ST-NXP Wireless, than the appointment of Alain Dutheil to be CEO of the new company.

On the face of it, it sounds utterly daft to use NOR flash for data storage. The cell is too large and the read speed too slow. But this is exactly what Spansion is proposing.

Just as well to get your holidays in before the end of August because that's when the world may disappear into a self-generated black hole as CERN throws the switch on its Large Hadron Collider.

 'Transitron have reduced by between 25 and 30 per cent the prices of their ceramic packaged Series IV TTL integrated circuits. The ICs are compatible with 74 series devices'.

So starts a story in the June 25 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly. The story continues:

"This business will not be a drag on Intel Corporation," said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, back in March, "we're going to fix it, or we're going to make sure it's profitable, one way or another."

A satisfying moment of one-upmanship occurred in Bandol, in the South of France last week. There, in a wine shop, was a bottle of Croizet-Bages.

Many years ago, National Semiconductor had an assembly plant in Haiti, at that time one of the worst governed countries on earth.

STMicroelectronics' acquisition, Genesis Microchip, is expected to result in a unified, high margin, digital chip-set next year.

This was a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of June 25^th 1969.

Who are Pye? You might ask. Where are they now?

* For the answers - see below*.

The EW story starts:

Japan's attitude to entrepreneurial semiconductor stat-ups is changing if Moriyoshi Nakashima, CEO of Genusion, is anything to go by.

We are used to getting curious remarks from marketing guys and Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, makes some of the more curious of them. 'Oh well he's not an engineer', is how these remarks get shrugged off, but here are a couple which raised some eyebrows:

 Thanks to Future Horizons for this one: the ten basic rules for succeeding in the chip industry. Here they are:

Note the apostrophe: in 'Mobile This was the headline to a story in the June 25^th 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly. It must have been one of the earliest uses of the term 'mobile phone' the apostrophe denoting the abbreviation from 'radiotelephone'. The story starts:

STMicroelectronics is not becoming a financial holding company with its operating units spun off into separate entities, despite the two joint ventures it has entered into this year, according to the company's Chief Financial Officer, Carlo Ferro.

To the world it was Enron, the collapsed US energy brokerage, which invented the off-balance sheet partnership. Not so. The real inventor of this financial stratagem to turn losses into profits was Tom Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital fund company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.

Another attempt to bring transparency and predictable pricing to the vexed issue of the wireless industry's use of IP, has been launched with Cisco, Intel, Samsung , Alcatel-Lucent, Clearwire and Xohm forming the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) to declare their Wimax patents and say how much they'll charge for their licensing.

If ever there was a commentary on globalisation it is the story of

Freescale's fab in Scotland, now facing almost certain closure after 39 years.

TSMC, the Taiwan foundry, will be in risk production of 32nm wafers in Q4 2009, according to Tom Quan, deputy director, EDA & design service marketing programme at TSMC.

It was amazing to me that Henry Nicholas, co-founder of Broadcom, has a $30 million sex cave under his house, and prostitutes on his payroll, and smoked so much marijuana that the pilot of a private jet had to wear an oxygen mask.

Should engineers run chip companies? A few years ago it was a no-brainer. The decisions taken relied so much on making a sound technical judgment that you had to have an engineer calling the shots.

$25 million is, of course, petty cash to Intel, but the significance of the Korean competition authorities in finding Intel guilty of offering unfair subsidies to Samsung and Trigem Computer, if they promised not to buy x86 processors from AMD, could be that other national regulators will follow suit.

Have you tried 2007 Sancerres? My first bottle of 2007 Sancerre tasted fabulous. So good that, as soon as we'd had the first sip, we ordered another case.

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PC companies and PC dealers in Europe are said to be watching very closely the result of the EC's investigation into Intel's alleged malpractices in the European PC market. If , in the autumn, the EC decides against Intel, as it is rumoured in the German press that it will, then what may follow is a legal class-action brought by PC companies and dealers in Europe which have suffered financial loss from the alleged malpractices.

Scott Fitzgerald was, apparently, quite right in saying that the rich are different from the rest of us. And thank God they are, because the credit crunch is showing how weird the lives of the rich are.

Thanks to Future Horizons for these, the ten most difficult questions facing the semiconductor industry in 2008:

'By the 1990s the cost of computing would probably be halved, Lord Hirshfield said during a House of Lords debate.'

This is how a story opened in Electronics Weekly's issue of June 18^th 1969 showing that Their Lordships talked as much balls in the 1960s as they do today.

US companies like Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and Rambus may moan about the EC investigations into their business practices, but they have only the US to blame for the EC's anti-trust rules.

With the European semiconductor industry in the middle of a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, with more expected, it is worth looking at the history of these things.

Talking last week abouy STMicroelectronics' plans to return the company to its roots as an analogue house, Carlo Ottaviani, ST's corporate vice president for communications, mused: "No one has ever managed to perfectly replicate the sound made by a Stradivarius violin."