September 2008 Archives

There's a simple answer to the liquidity crisis - the government sets up a bank which takes deposits, lends money to businesses and individuals and keeps the financial system running until any surviving banks feel capable of returning to performing their normal functions.

How do you overcome the rising costs of ASIC? Add programmability, says John Daane, CEO of programmable logic pioneer Altera.

The good news is: 'The world has capital coming out its ears'. The even better news is that the guy who said that is the CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group, which knows more about the finances of the US high-tech sector than anyone else.

It's fairly amazing to think that, if you want a fully functional 28nm chip, you'll be able to get one by the end of this year. TSMC is promising to have a 28nm CyberShuttle prototyping service available by the end of the year.

After so many years of being exposed to the chronically loss-making NOR flash market, Spansion's shares are a very affordable $2 apiece.

Ed Sturmer, co-founder, with Dick Skipworth, of Memec which became the world's third largest electronic component distributor, tells a yarn of how it nearly all went horribly wrong when, a year after starting the company, most of Memec's stock was stolen.

Surely that Arthur C Clarke idea of the Space Elevator is something mind-blowingly many years away from reality? Isn't it? Believe it or not, a body called The Japan Space Elevator Association has just published plans how to build one.

Consolidation always strikes me as a miserable business and, according to that insightful PriceWaterhouseCoopers book, Five Frogs On A Log, destroys shareholder value more often than increasing it, so I was a bit surprised to find three  semiconductor industry CEOs saying, last week, that the semiconductor industry needs more consolidation.

There was once a persistent entrepreneur who founded a chip company which became, at the time, the fastest growing company Silicon Valley had ever known. It could produce a chip-set replicating a new version of an IBM PC at the same time as IBM could do it and in fewer chips than IBM could do it.

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Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for this one, the ten best apps for those who've managed to 'jailbreak', or unlock their their iPods.

CEOs go through some of the same merde as the rest of us, as this tale, told to me by a Silicon Valley CEO, shows.

"IF THE DISCRETE component manufacturer is dead then we, as a dead company, have only doubled our turn-over' in the last five years."

So starts a story in the July 9 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Silicon Inn is now open for business on:

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Please keep sending in your recommendations for new branches of the Silicon Inn.

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Simply click on the above link and post a comment in reply to the post - just fill in the comment boxes. We will take the comment and add an entry to the global map.

The more we have, the merrier we shall be.

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With SanDisk's share price well below the offer price for the company by Samsung, it seems that the markets do not hold out a lot of hope for the takeover attermpt being successful.

The great thing about Gordon Brown's banning of short selling last week was that it showed he's prepared to deny the share traders some of their practices.

Semiconductor-savvy CEOs are becoming a much-missed, diminishing breed in the chip industry, so it was particularly refreshing to meet Ted Tewksbury, CEO of IDT, last week. 

When Bill Hewlett pushed for the development of a handheld calculator, the marketing management at HP were fiercely against the idea.

Many thanks to all who sent in their recommendations

for branches of the Silicon Inn.

We thought we might as well kick off with an initial 60 Silicon

Inns around the world, in the hope that more branches will keep coming in from you all, as you travel around.

So we are announcing the Grand Opening of the Silicon Inn  next Tuesday.

The experiences of the private equity industry in the semiconductor industry should have put them off any further investment in the chip industry, according to John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Having just finished 'Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile', I have to agree with the author that laissez-faire capitalism has to be moderated with a fairer socio- economic system if the West is to solve its social problems.

Interesting to hear Frans van Houten, NXP's CEO, say that he remains  content with the private equity ownership of NXP, which was bought in 2006 by a consortium headed up by Wall Street buy-out company, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts.

Thanks to the Sunday Times for this list which was compiled by Professor John Quelch, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. According to Quelch the ten signs that the CEO's going off the rails are when:

THE self-defeating effect of US tariffs and restrictions on trade with Eastern Europe has aroused some resentment among business houses who have witnessed trade diminish to almost zero level and at the same time not having the desired effect of subjugating the Soviet Union.

So starts a story in the July 9 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Here, Ladies and Gentlemen, is where you could be spending some time this autumn as you travel the globe.

The Silicon Inn is not a physical place, it is that little bit of Britain you carry in your brain when you go abroad, and which is triggered, after a long day of presentations, when the thought gells, then emerges: 'Christ I could do with a pint of wallop'.   

Usually this is a pipedream. The only 'beer' to be had is yellow, cold, fizzy and tasteless i.e. foreign muck. 

OLED has proved to be a disappointment, according to Paul Gray of analysts DisplaySearch, speaking at Sharp's recent Innovation Forum in Munich.

How long before anyone ever again takes seriously the opinion of analysts, advisers and executives employed by banks and stockbrokers?

It's not how the size but what you do with it that counts, and Spansion is going down a counter-intuitive application route for what it hopes will be ultra-small die, ultra-high bit-per-cell, ultra-cheap memory.

The Founders of Intel, by all accounts, had some epic feuds and, after they were resolved, adopted the old Soviet Union practice of air-brushing the offender out of its official history.

With NXP closing or downsizing four fabs today, you have to ask: Are asset-lite strategies a good idea?  

Blue laser diodes are coming down in price towards the point where consumer applications are finding them affordable.

Having just received this anguished message from an Israeli reader, I wondered if there's anyone out there who can help. The message runs:

"i need your help.
   i want a c program on programming design and flowcharts of parallel processor.pls help me out"

Answers please to: mtnayor@yahoo.com

Further to a previous post and a follow-up post on how to make a fortune while sitting in the pub, a clever mate came up with these three ideas for new iPhone applications while sitting in the pub at the weekend.

I must say seeing this on YouTube reminded me of a couple of pigeons I watched while sitting in that magnificent Thames-side boozer, The Cutty Sark in Greenwich. It's worth turning up the sound.

Will home automation ever happen? Sharp was saying yesterday at its Innovation Forum in Munich that Zigbeee-enabled sensors are the means by which this could happen.

Where are the semiconductor-savvy bosses? This was the recent question of  Malcolm Penn, CEO of leading analysts Future Horizons. With more and more companies run by finance-driven executives, here are the ten most semiconductor-savvy bosses. Some are no longer CEOs, but all are active in the industry.

There was once a great company where the middle management were afraid to tell the senior management bad news.

Tomorrow, unless a group of scientists led by German chemist Otto Rossler get an order preventing it from the European Court of Human Rights, CERN switches on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Rossler argues this may create a black hole into which we will all disappear.

The generally horrible mess that private equity buy-outs have made of semiconductor acquisitions e.g. KKR - NXP and  Blackstone - Freescale, could be matched by a 'success' with the planned IPO for KKR/SilverLake-owned chip company Avago Technologies formerly owned by Agilent.

Trapped charge technology can extend down to 18nm, according to Spansion, which believes it will have a lock on the technological future of flash memory when traditional floating gate techniques run out.

This week Acorn celebrates its 30th anniversary. It was founded in 1978. "It was the year in which the BBC ran a programme called 'The Chip'", says Acorn co-founder Dr Hermann Hauser, now boss of Amadeus Capital Partners the high-tech venture capital company.

After commenting on market rumours and speculation that SanDisk is in merger talks with Samsung, SanDisk made this rather witty comment: "We maintain a policy of not commenting on market rumours or speculation."

In his book Chip Management, the former CEO of Toshiba's semiconductor division, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, wonders about the system by which, after his retirement from Toshiba, several American companies invited him to join their boards.

Holy Smoke! Apple is getting sued for over-stating the data rate on its 3G iPhone. This is a bummer for the telecommunications industry which routinely claims data-rates at least double whatever is realistically achievable.

On a BA plane I buy a solar powered mosquito repellent device. "Female mosquitoes normally bite during their spawning period, at this time they do not like being approached by male mosquitoes, so the repellent produces the same frequency of the male mosquito (around 5KHz - 9KHz) to repel the female mosquitoes," runs the accompanying description of the rather witty principle on which the device works.

'IN THE LAST two or three years, pulse code modulation has moved from a novel but promising transmission technique to performing a major role in the telecommunications network', writes John Slow, Head of Transmission Systems Division, Plessey BTR Limited, in the January 28th 1970 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Phase change memory has to move from a transistor array to a diode array, has to add non-volatility to a diode array, and will have to master multi-bit per cell technology before it can be a commercial product, according to the CEO of Spansion, Bertrand Cambou.

Forbes magazine dismisses Qualcomm's defeat in the US courts by Broadcom as a 'minor bump'. Qualcomm has been ordered to pay Broadcom all the profit it has made from its QChat service whatever that is, and whatever they may be. What's significant is that it is another legal defeat in a long series of defeats.

America is the last place on earth to hear English oratory. Oratory of the mind-changing, tear-jerking, rib-tickling kind. It was great to come home last week, turn on the telly, and catch the big speeches from the previous day's proceedings at the Democratic Convention.

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