July 2009 Archives

Professor Gilbert Stead, of the Cavendish Laboratory, wrote a song about the discoveries of Max Planck which was frequently sung by the faculty and students of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University after their annual dinners. 

Interesting to hear an American CEO saying that the workings of a communist dictatorship are more efficient than the workings of liberal democratic capitalism, but that's what Freescale CEO Rich Beyer reckons.

At the end of the 1980s, America got worried that it wouldn't have enough DRAMs, so it proposed raising $1 billion to set up a company called US Memories, headed up by an IBM executive, to make DRAMs which had been invented by IBM scientist Robert Dennard.

Q2 results are mostly in. Who was the star of the show? Take a bow, UMC, which reported Q2 revenues double Q1. Generally the results trended up and to the right and, as they trickled in, the Philadelphia SOX wended its jerky way above 300. In mid-March it was 190.

It would be a fine thing if the Netbook market turned out to be as disruptive to the computer industry status quo as some people think it might be. Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, reckons it's going to allow: "A new set of companies where anyone can win and grow into big companies."

Thanks to iSuppli  for this one. Here are the top ten contract electronics manufacturers for 2008 with, next to them, there estimated 2008 revenues in $billions:

Qualcomm appears to be following the same trail as Intel in falling foul of regulators around the world. The behaviour appears to derive from a mental aberration that comes over American companies at a particular stage in their development.

'"The rapidly increasing depth of knowledge in the UK in design, production and use of transistors is creating an ever-widening demand", said Mr A.N. Provost, Managing Director of Texas Instruments in London, last week.'

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of May 31st 1961.

I can't tell you what it is, because everyone would have a crack at it, but a couple of mates and I are developing an iPhone app.

The fact that Intel is arguing that its billion Euro fine infringed its human rights, suggests that Intel's lawyers are scraping the barrel a bit.

In his book 'Only The Paranoid Survive,' Andy Grove, former Chairman, President and CEO of Intel, tells how the company got its start. It was a case of third time lucky.

René Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP makes a telling analogy between Moore's Law and Concorde.

There was once a very great man who co-founded a very great company and, in 1970, he came up with the notion that a pocketable hand-held scientific calculator would be a great product.

The silicon foundry industry is mostly profitless, and a profitless foundry industry may force IDMs going fab-lite to think again, because a profitless industry will have to start re-thinking its prices.

The mobile phone manufacturers are becoming more influential than the mobile phone operators in generating mobile data revenues.

The Midlands is in a good position to have a completely automatic telephone service by 1970, the target set by the Post Office, said Mr W.T.Gemmell, director of the Midland Region, at the recent opening of an automatic exchange at Barlaston, near Stone, Staffordshire, ' starts a story in the May 3^rd 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

'Ninety five per cent of all telephones in the Midlands were connected to automatic exchanges, which was higher than the national figure, he added.'

TOMORROW: THE TEN BEST BUSINESS BOOKS

Carlo Bozotti, CEO, seems to be getting the hang of this semiconductor thing. In a stroke worthy of his illustrious predecessor, he has got the French government to stump up a good chunk of change to support ST's process R&D and most advanced production facility.

Today is the first day for taking up the Infineon rights issue, and the opportunity to do so will last until August 3^rd. It is very much to be hoped that every Infineon shareholder buys the maximum he or she can.

"I was always studying with the idea of becoming a designer", recounts Pasquale Pistorio, "the more the subject was theoretical, the more I was interested; the more practical the subject, the less I was interested. I was top in mathematics and top in physics. I was in love with the equations of Maxwell. It was fascinating for me, intellectually, that this man was able to discover, simply by mathematics, electromagnetic waves - that he could predicate their existence many decades before they were physically identified. That, for me, is pure genius".

It's been a good week for the semiconductor industry with the Philadelphia SOX nudging 290. When you think it was 190 in March, that's motoring. The recent SOX surge is all down to Intel, and IBM's results will keep the momentum rolling.

Many years ago when the IT industry was young, and the microprocessor was a novelty, and transistor densities and IC performance were doubling every year, a curious consensus emerged:  We would all have to be trained for leisure.

Goldman Sachs is taking the piss. An average Q2 bonus of $226,000 per employee raises the prospect of an average $1 million per employee pay-out for the year.

I always thought the private equity industry was, quite simply, bad - but now it occurs to me that it might, actually, be mad.

Thanks to the Centre for Brand Analysis for this one. Here they are  - the top ten brands in the world.

It was the foundries which first called this upturn, and it seems they are leading the semiconductor industry out of its slump with a surge in sales, capex spending and expectations.

'A new technique for detecting the minute sensory nerve signals produced in man by external physical stimuli has been developed in the Medical Electronics Department of St. Thomas' Hospital.'

So starts a story in the May 3rd 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Intel has gone berserk about operating systems. It's been working on Chrome, it's developed Moblin, it's historically wedded to Windows, it apparently worked on Android, it's linked with the Symbian-based Nokia, and it's just bought embedded OS developer WindRiver.

After the appalling mess Blackstone and KKR have made of their acquisitions Freescale and NXP, it beggars belief that another semiconductor company can be welcoming the advances of a private equity company.

When Dr Ulrich Schumacher, now CEO of Grace Semiconductor, was managing the memory division at Siemens Semiconductors, which was later spun off to become Infineon Technologies, he realised that Micron Technology's Megabit DRAM was much smaller than theirs.

What a lot of time and money is being wasted duplicating other peoples' products. Microsoft has spent years producing Bing - a sub-standard alternative to Google's search engine, and Google has spent a fortune producing Android - now being dropped all-round as a Netbook OS - and gaining little traction as a Smartphone OS.

There was once a CEO of Apple Computer who told a Harvard Business School  meeting that his two biggest mistakes were:

Well you could knock me down with a feather. There's good old UMC of Taiwan, the world's second largest silicon foundry, saying it's completely out of 300mm capacity.

Another day, another Netbook operating system. I thought we had Android for Netbooks and, if not Android, then XP or Windows 7 or, if you're a Linuxy x86 fan - Moblin. But Google is developing a new Netbook OS called Chrome.

You love it. You hate it. It delights you and it drives you mad with rage and despair. Here are The Ten Most Annoying Things About Technology:

The one thing which Welsh-Not-So-Wizard Howard Stringer has failed to restore to Sony, despite all his cost-cutting, is a return to that luminous quality of innovative charm which infused so many Sony products.

"Epitaxial transistors very soon. Planar devices by early 1962. These are the basic plans of the Ferranti Electronics Department", starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of April 19^th 1961.

Is ST going to save the world? An ST chip has been certified by the Singapore National Public Health Laboratory.as capable of identifying Swine Flu.

 Lee De Forest inventor of the Audion tube, also called both the 'De Forest valve', and the 'triode valve', which allowed the amplification of radio waves so they could travel long distances  was, in 1913, sued for mail fraud by the Attorney-General of the USA.

Is end demand for semiconductors beginning to grow? Some analysts seem to think that Q3 could see a return to growth in real end-user demand.

There was once a company founded in 1951 that was a by-word for successfully managing technological transition.

To start two posts in a week with 'Good Old EU' is totally unexpected. On Tuesday it was the EU's action in standardising mobile phone chargers, now it's bringing down the cost of phone calls and texting while abroad.

The IPO market is sputtering back into action with Morgan Stanleyforecasting 35 to 40 floats in Europe in the next two years, with 127 floats in the worldwide IPO pipeline according to Thomson Reuters, and with a  big IPO success yesterday in the US with software start-up LogMeIn.

Thanks to IC Insights for this one - the top ten semiconductor companies for 2008. Here they are: