November 2008 Archives

In the 1970s, the all-powerful Tokyo Civil Service decided it was time to take on the US computer colossi: IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell).

There was once a genius who made a fundamental building block which ensured fabulous riches for the electronics industry for sixty years.

Qimonda could be starting a whole new model for the DRAM industry. Apparently it has asked the German government for financial help under its 500 billion Euro bail-out plan for German industry, while the State of Saxony may take a direct shareholding in Qimonda.

Toshiba blinked first. Reports in Japan that Toshiba is considering postponing two new NAND Megafabs are just a face-saving way of getting the news out. It's also a capex-saving way. By not starting the fab-building next year, Toshiba will save a good chunk of its $3.9 billion budgeted capex for the financial year.

Thanks for this to Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon, computer scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, and Hans Meuer of the University of Manheim who compiled the 32nd edition of the list of the world's TOP500 supercomputers.

'American Microsystems Inc (AMI) who are rated in the USA along with General Instrument as the leading producers of MOS devices, are to enter the European MOS market.'

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's issue of  July 30^th 1969.

Quite clearly the Samsung concept phone with the folding screen is the key to unlocking mobile Internet revenue. With a five inch screen a cellphone becomes a viable portable computer, TV or video player.

Has IM Flash Technologies sneaked a process technology lead on its rivals in the flash market? It certainly looks that way.

One of the interesting things about this financial downturn is that no one really has a clue what's going to happen.

Intel shares at $12.50. ST's shares at Euros 5.05. TI at $14.50. National Semiconductor at $9.97. What's happening to the semiconductor industry?

In 1970 the pre-eminent Japanese IC companies were Hitachi, NEC and Mitsubishi. Toshiba was an also-ran. That year, Toshiba sent two engineers, one of which was Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, later to become a famous CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, to meet  Sharp's most famous executive, Tadashi Sasaki.

Good financial news is becoming a rarity these days so it's excellent to hear that British high-tech VCs didn't flinch during the year. Up to the end of Q3 they'd put £765 million into UK and Irish high-tech start-ups which, if  Q4 was going to be normal which it probably won't be, would see the year closing out at £1 billion which is about the same as recent years.

'Ampex have been funded by the US government to the tune of over £1.5 million, following their successful prototypes, to deliver a bulk storage system for computers that will give rapid access to around 300,000 million characters of data.'

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of July 23^rd 1969.

With the awful examples of Rambus and Qualcomm in front of it, it's a bold move by Spansion to decide to sue Samsung for patent infringement in a bid to establish itself as an IP licensing company.

There was once a semiconductor company with a simple, successful strategy: To make all the chips inside a PC except the microprocessor and the memory.

Here, according to the Global Semiconductor Alliance (the old Fabless Semiconductor Association) are the top ten fabless semiconductor companies measured by  Q2 revenues:

Quite clearly the financial authorities in the UK and US haven't got a clue. Both the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Mervyn King, and the Secretary of the US Treasury, Henry Paulson, are useless at sorting out the financial mess.

One of the benefits, or tribulations, of being elected a head of state seems to be that every one and their dog lines up to tell you what to do.

Qualcomm has dropped the development of its successor to CDMA technology Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) and will re-focus its 4G effort on LTE.

As the bringer of Nemesis to the hubristic, there could be no more appropriate character than Gordon Brown.

Robert X Cringely, in his wonderful book Accidental Empires, tells a rib-tickling yarn about the early days of Apple. It happened in the late 1970s when Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges.

A notable feature of the recent American election campaign was the grace of the speeches by the defeated candidates, and one wonders if this is something inherited from the Red Indians.

Interesting at Electronica to hear the semiconductor companies all banging on about applications. Not so many years back they were all banging on about breakthroughs. The next generation of chip, a new process technology or a new material..

Has profitability deserted the wireless business? After all it's inevitable that IC-based businesses commoditise. The first to do so were digital watches and electronic calculators. They commoditised quickly, going from units prices of several hundred dollars to single figure dollars in about five years.

At the back end of the '60s a new chip company set out to make MOS memories and microprocessors. It brought out the industry standard 16K DRAM, and led the memory market at the 16k and 64k generations.

Thanks to IC Insights for this one which came out last month.

The semiconductor industry has known for decades that 'only the paranoid survive' thanks to the great Andy Grove, and the object of paranoia in the semiconductor industry is the foundry industry.

Mentor says that parallel processing accelerates design closure and timing analysis by four times on an eight core machine.

If you want an object lesson in how to make money in the semiconductor industry, there's no one better to give it than a guy who's been doing just that for 27 years.

This was the headline of a story in Electronics Weekly dated July 16^th 1969. The story starts:

'National Semiconductor is to open new factories in Scotland and West Germany in the near future, and are to expand rapidly their Santa Clara and Singapore operations to ensure that they become the fourth largest in the world semiconductor market ratings.'

"At Memec we developed a system of knowing and grading suppliers", says Dick Skipworth, founder and first Chairman of Memec, which became the third largest distributor in the world,.

Who will be the Chief Technology Officer of the USA? US President-elect Barack Obama has said he's going to create such an office and there is intense speculation in the US technology industry about who will be appointed to fill it.

Two of the IC industry's cherished rules appear to be being broken by the parlous state of the NAND market: Rule One: While revenues may decline the growth in unit volume rarely does; Rule Two: People always want more storage capacity.

It's amazing how America throws up the right guy at the right time.

Well, here they are, the top ten items on the semiconductor industry's wish-list:

Recently,  I met a former Ferranti Semiconductors guy, now CEO of Xintronix, Steve Cliffe.

Having spent the last couple of weeks in the USA, it does seem there's something wobbly about the voting system there. People just don't have total trust in it.

Maybe we under-estimate the German sense of humour. Going through Munich airport recently, an airport known for the toughness of its security regime, I had to remove my jacket, belt and shoes and take out my liquids, mobile phone and laptop.

Carbon nanotubes will be used commercially in the form of a fabric, called buckypaper, within a year, according to researchers at Florida State University quoted in the San Jose Mercury News.