July 2008 Archives

The process technology of graphics processors will overtake the process technology of CPUs next year, when TSMC starts making graphics processing units (GPUs) for Nvidia and ATI  on a 40 nm process in the first half of next year, according to a piece in TG Daily.

Within the semiconductor industry a new elephant is in the room, and the elephant is getting hungry.

Everyone's scared of Google. That's one explanation of the Intel/HP/Yahoo move to collaborate in Cloud computing.

It probably won't be welcomed by NXP, but NXP's owner, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts (KKR), has said that it still has a lot to do to NXP which it regards as an 'under-performer'.

Rambus is looking to cut jobs, monetise flash interfaces, sue Nvidia for treble damages and get a legal order stopping Hynix selling DRAM in the US.

"We are working with utmost urgency on the question how to close the chapter on Qimonda as quickly as possible," Peter Bauer, CEO of Infineon, tells the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

There will be a fight for wafers next year as the chip industry moves to a period of severe capacity shortage, and the reason for the dire situation is the lack of 'chip-savvy' CEOs, says Europe's top chip industry analyst.

The week before, Friday July 11th, Ted Hoff told the story of how it was invented. This week, Federico Faggin tells how it was made.

'Plastic v Ceramic'

'Boys, you can stop fighting'.

'Transitron have removed the price decision on  Series 74TTL.'

Now that Nokia and Qualcomm have settled their lawsuit, the question arises: Will Nokia buy chip-sets from Qualcomm?

I solved the energy problem some years ago in the bath. You roof over part of an African country with solar panels. The locals get shade. The world gets energy.  Now the EC has pinched the idea.

Now it's the season of corporate jaunts, why not Somerset?  Instead of airports, being crammed into aluminium tubes and queues for car hire, you can toddle down the A303 or A30, or take a two hour and a half hour train ride from Waterloo to Yeovil, and be in a brand new room with a floor to ceiling window looking over, arguably, the best view in England.

www.farmyardretreat.co.uk takes parties of up to 30. The accommodation is very modern and stylish and high-tech with WiFi, iPod docks etc. The sheets are Egyptian cotton. The apartments are on two floors. It opened in May after being purpose-built.

In front of the apartments is a lake for fishing and beyond that a clay pigeon shooting range. Both are for residents.

Check out the brochure on http://www.farmyardretreat.co.uk

It's good to see start-ups doing something dramatic. So many do incremental stuff - 30 per cent more performance, 30 per cent less power etc. Grand aspirations were what the semiconductor industry used to be about.

There seems to be a schism opening up between the semiconductor industry and the semiconductor production equipment industry.

'Recent observers to the seething melting pot that is the European computer scene, are a delegation of 14 Japanese computer technologists'.

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of July 2^nd 1969.

NXP appears to have made an ass of itself in taking to court a group of researchers from the Radboud University at Nijmegen who cracked the security on the company's RFID chips. A Dutch judge has refused NXP's request for an injunction preventing the researchers revealing their findings.

Last Friday July 11th  Ted Hoff told the story of how the first microprocessor was invented. This week, Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, tells how it was designed.

 Utility > effort + risk, where: utility = willingness to pay; & effort = everyone's effort, is the equation devised by Steve Baker, Director of Software Platform Strategy at Motorola, for deciding whether a mobile phone application is worth doing.

The Japanese, those dedicated early adopters of new technology and devotees of the 17-syllable Haiku, have apparently become very enthused about reading short stories on their mobile phone handsets.

An interesting piece on the US news site Marketwatch by Douglas McIntyre, argues that "Intel's main business has not evolved much since Noyce died." Bob Noyce, co-inventor of the IC, co-founded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and was the founding CEO of both companies. He died in 1990.

How often do you get an answer to a question which starts off: 'It depends how you define xyz?'

The hi-tec world is full of contests between companies, standards, technologies, etc. Here are the ten best contests currently excercising the hi-tec scene:

Not renowned for his punctuality, it turns out that Simon Knowles, founder and vice president for silicon engineering at wireless start-up Icera Semiconductor, has earned himself an interesting soubriquet from colleagues.

Apparently the South-West Regional Development Authority (SWRDA) is proposing to spend £300 million on a science park near Bristol.

All US companies interviewed at the 6^th International Components Show in Milan this month claim that the IC market in Italy should reach boom proportions by 1971.

Hard on the heels of revelations that SSDs don't save much power compared to HDDs, a Fujitsu executive has come out with the view that SSDs are not yet useful for replacing HDDs in laptops or servers.

Microcircuit production at SGS' Falkirk factory will be approaching the level of half-a-million units a month by the end of this year, and plans are now being finalised to bring this capability up to around one million units a month by the end of the year.

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 24 1969.

 Going through airports may become a less miserable experience if the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) gets its latest technologies established.

If, and it's a Big If, SanDisk has cracked the problem of  how to make re-writeable 3-D flash memory, then it has a dilemma: should it license the technology to Samsung?

Would you Adam n' Eve it there's a debate going on about whether SSDs use more power than HDDs?

Dr Masatoshi Shima who designed the logic for the world's first microprocessor, the 4004, tells an interesting yarn revealing the iconic status in Japan of Intel founder Bob Noyce.

Mike Moritz, the Californian venture capitalist with Sequoia, who recently gave £25 million to his old Oxford College, Christ Church, seems to have risked upsetting fellow alumni of  'The House' as they like to call their alma mater.

Open source mobile operating systems will be the way the mobile industry goes with The Symbian Foundation, backed by Nokia, Motorola, Vodafone, DoCoMo and Texas Instruments among others, and with Google's Android supported by Qualcomm.

 "When I was in charge of the semiconductor business, the memory business, which today is one of the important pillars of the company, was regarded as a dog at the time. Generation shifts occurred every three or four years, prices tended to fall radically, we were losing a lot of money", writes the legendary former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, in his book Chip Management.

Peter Bauer, recently promoted from the curious title of 'Spokesman of  The Management Board' to CEO of Infineon, in succession to ex-CEO Dr Wolfgang Ziebart, says that the company is gathering all the internal information needed to present a memorandum to potential buyers.

It was sad to hear about the death of J.R.Simplot, who put up the founding money for Micron Technology. He had a good innings, dying in May at 99 after the most colourful life.

How on earth do you get the price of commodity chips to go up? Answer: Create a fear of shortage.

Why can't Intel do low-power? Simple answer: Intel has always scaled for speed. Does that mean Intel can't or won't scale for low-power when low-power is required? Yes, seems to be the amazing answer.

Solid-state techniques are making inroads into one of the few remaining areas where, until now, valves have remained unchallenged - high voltage technology.

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's issue of June 25^th 1969. It continues:

The wireless industry is clearly scared stiff of another round of fabulously costly litigation when it moves to LTE and Wimax, with another defensive IP alliance being formed between Verizon,  Google, Cisco, HP called the Allied Security Trust.