March 2009 Archives

4G will not be bedeviled with the same kind of legal disputes which marred the roll-out of 3G, according to Michael Mamaghani, director of  marketing at Qualcomm, speaking at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco.

We haven't heard much recently about the CTO of the USA, though it was a big talking point just before the US elections. Is this because the President's choice was Steve Jobs?

Waking up in America yesterday, woozy from jet-lag, I fumble for the remote and turn the telly on. As usual for American TV it's showing an ad. But this is no ordinary ad. The banner headline is: 'Learn how to get your share of the trillion dollar bail-out.'

'Looking around Racal's modern factory at Bracknell, it seems hardly possible that a mere ten years ago this virile organisation, now with a turnover of some £2 million a year, did not exist,' continues the report.

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of April 26^th 1961 describing a visit to Racal Engineering -  the company which later spawned Racal Telecom which became Vodafone.

TOMORROW: THE TEN BEST ELECTRICAL INVENTIONS

Americans are going through a fundamental shift in behaviour - they are moving from being the biggest spenders on the planet to becoming a nation of savers, with fundamental consequences for the economy.

Creditors are hell. NXP and Freescale are beginning to find that out. Freescale has been sued by its creditors over its recent buy-out of debt, and NXP's bondholders are preparing to sue the company to have its debt-swap declared illegal.

SEMI, the trade body for the semiconductor production equipment industry, is running a campaign to get the EC to support the microelectronics industry in Europe. Last Friday, SEMI arranged for a visit of EU Glitterati to IMEC.

A charming yarn is told by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in his brilliant book iWoz.

In their pre-Apple days, Wozniak and Jobs were in the business of flogging little boxes, designed by Wozniak, which allowed you to make a telephone call anywhere in the world, for nothing.

These top chaps have an amazing cheek. Here comes Intel's management saying it will reduce its payments into its employees' retirement plans. How much cash does Intel have in the bank? $14 billion.

There was once a company with a magnificent global vision. It would become a global telecommunications operator with everyone on the planet a potential customer.

How are the mighty fallen. Vodafone and Telefonica, the Spanish operator which owns O2, are now sharing their mobile networks in a deal will reduce the total number of cellphone masts in operation.

Who brought up these bankers? Where were they educated? They appear to have had no exposure to that most basic of human social ideas, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract.

Thanks to the BBC for this one. Here they are, the ten most dangerous programming errors:

It's off to the races, guys. The S&P 500 had its biggest rise in 60 years over the last ten days - up 22 per cent. The Japanese Nikkei is up 20 per cent from its March 10th, 20 year low. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index is up 21 per cent since March 9. The Philadelphia SOX has gone from 188 to 234 in a couple of weeks.

'After having had an interesting visit to the American IRE show in New York with our sales manager Mr R.E.Gillett, I thought I would write and inform your readers of a new electronic device displayed there which offers some possibilities for British industry,' starts a reader's letter in the April 19^th 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Freescale has kicked off the jolliest wheeze for years with semiconductor companies buying back their debt for a fraction of its par value. The latest to do this is the Taiwanese DRAM company ProMOS Technologies which has paid off its convertible bondholders for 25 cents on the $.

In the media business you get to go to a lot of press announcements but the only ones you remember are the cock-ups.

Oh dear. My plan to use the current economic chaos to make my next (actually my first) significant fortune has come unstuck. AMD shares have shot up from $2 to $3 in March without my noticing.

Once upon a time there was a general feeling among UK electronics executives that talking to the press was a mad, bad and dangerous thing to do. Journos, they felt, were rude, crude and socially unattractive.

Is Intel really worried about AMD's moves to set up an Arab-backed foundry company? Is that why Intel has said the foundry won't have a licence to manufacture x86 parts?

The change of emphasis at Toshiba - from semiconductors to power generation - has coincided with a change at the top. The new President will be an executive from the heavy electrical machinery division who is an expert in  nuclear energy generation, corporate senior vice president Norio Sasaki.

Thanks to Future Horizons for this one. The ten fastest apps for semiconductors last year were:

How long has the IDM got? Five years? Ten? The current consensus is that only the specialist guys, the foundry guys, the DRAM guys and Intel will still have fabs in five to ten years time.

'Users Still Cautious About Tunnel Diodes' is the headline of a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of April 19th 1961. The story, wirtten by one of my predecessors as Components Correspondent, starts: 'While at the Footscray works of Standards Telephone and Cables I saw some of the application work which is now going on with the tunnel diode.' 

Call it a MID, call it a Netbook, call it an ultra-mobile PC, call it a smartphone - whatever you like to call it it's the hot new thing. And about time too for everyone fed up of lugging around 6lb office Dells.

Could things be about to get better? The Philadelphia SOX is going up - not by much but it's up 2.45 per cent this year. TSMC, a harbinger of industry trends, has increased its revenue forecast citing Chinese ordering. Intel, Adobe, Sun, Cisco, Google, Apple, HP and Applied  - the elite of tech - saw significant share price gains last week.

The first semiconductor production equipment company was Electroglas, according to Gordon Moore.

I suppose it's a jolly good thing if ratings agencies suggest you're going to default on your debt, because that depresses the market  value of your debt, and you can then buy it back at a very low price.

The $250m Square Wafer

There was once a very famous man who set up a company which aimed to revolutionise the logic in computers.

The company had offices in the US and a production plant in Ireland supplied by the Irish Development Authority.

The company raised some $250 million in the early 1980s and succeeded in manufacturing a wafer-scale logic circuit on a square wafer.

This square wafer was paraded around to the press and potential investors. Most were puzzled by it, but a few companies bought into the concept and put up money.

Eventually the whole thing collapsed and the investors lost the lot.

MORAL: Reputations are, sometimes, not enough.

It was quite shocking to hear last week that the most difficult part of the start-up process for a UK high-tech start-up was getting an introduction to a venture capitalist. In the end the company had to pay to get an introduction.

The mark-to-market accountancy rule imposed on financial institutions which says they have to value assets at the price they would get for them in today's market, is hammering the private equity companies and scaring off their investors.

Thanks to Future Horizons for this. The ten biggest semiconductor applications in 2008 were:

The funniest remark of last week came from the unlikely source of a private equity magnate.

'The exhibits at Olympia demonstrating the highest levels of electronics technology will undoubtedly be the integrated circuits', started a preview of  the RECMF (Radio and Electronic Components Manufacturers) exhibition, covered in Electronics Weekly's edition of May 14^th 1969.

Whatever you do, don't buy an Atom-based Netbook. That's because at least ten ARM-based Netbooks will be out on the High Street this year, according to Warren East, CEO of ARM.

Pat Haggerty, CEO of Texas Instruments, was one of the greatest CEOs the semiconductor industry ever had. Three fabulous initiatives show why Haggerty was so great.

When's a debt not a debt? When it's publicly traded bondholders' debt seems to be the answer to that one.

There was once a company which had a business in microprocessors, microcontrollers (called PICs), speech and sound chips, EAROMs and ROMs. When the computer games industry emerged in the 1970s, with a huge appetite for ROMs, this company did extremely well.

Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale Semiconductor, sees Intel's foundry deal with TSMC for the Atom processor, as a way of levelling the playing field between Intel and other companies, like Freescale, competing in Atom's target market for Netbooks and MIDs.

Wow! Things are hotting up. Hard on the heels of Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying last week that Intel has design-wins in smartphones, Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said Nokia is thinking of getting into laptops.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity," said Kallasvuo, " we don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cellphone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging. Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication."

Well that's about as strong as it gets that a CEO is going into a new area.

Suddenly, instead of just trying to knock ARM around, Intel is taking on someone its own size. If Nokia decides to step forward for the ARM + Linux formula for the netbook market, then Intel has a real fight on its hands.

Thanks to The Independent for this one - the ten companies which have destroyed most value in the acquiring company's share price. The most destructive deal of all-time was, reckons The Indie, RBS' takeover of ABN-Amro. Apparently only 35 per cent of M&A deals lead to an increase in the value of the acquiring company's shares

Reports of the death of the gallium arsenide industry have been greatly exaggerated with GaAs ICs just short of being a $4 billion market last year, according to analysts Strategic Analytics. The 2008 market, at $3.9 billion, was 8 per cent up on 2007.

The Japanese electronics industry continued its vigorous advance during the first nine months of  last year', is the start of a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of March 29^th 1961.

'Compared with the corresponding period of 1959, production from January to September 1960 of electronic products was up 31 per cent," adds the story.

The story continues: 'the highest gain was made in electronic computers (a 172 per cent increase). Industrial measuring and control equipment for automation was up by 73 per cent. Production of transmitting and special purpose valves rose by 50 per cent while output of receiving valves increased by 45 per cent. Transistor production was up 34 per cent.'

'The total value of all electronic products manufactured in the first nine months of 1960 was almost exactly £300 million compared with £234 million in the same period of 1959', continues the story, 'the result for the full year, therefore, is likely to reach £400 million, and will probably be higher.'

The story concludes: 'At this level, Japan's overall electronics production is not so far behind the estimated annual output of Britain's electronics industry.'

One of the questions Intel has undoubtedly got lots of briefing notes on for this evening's announcement of its outsourcing deal on Atom with TSMC is: Why is Intel outsourcing its Atom chip when it has enormous amounts of spare capacity itself?