Bob Noyce, founding CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Sematech, was closely involved for many years with another company, originally called Typereader and later called Caere. The company tried to invent a scanner for reading type.
A single world standard for 4G cellular networks would be a fine thing. It would produce economies of scale for equipment suppliers, and it would simplify roaming. But it's not, of course, going to happen.
The world's top memory company had such a great reputation for manufacturing expertise that the owners of the three most important microprocessors for the succeeding quarter of a century, the 8086, the Z80 and the 68000, gave the memory company second sourcing rights to their microprocessors in return for fab deals.
You'd think the last people to object to Google photographing their streets would be the Swiss, because the Swiss never get up to anything interesting on their streets.
Big companies sometimes take your breath away. Look at Nokia bringing out this ridiculous 'Booklet 3G' - claimed to be a Netbook, but weighing 1.25kg.
Most of human-kind suffers under one delusion or another or several. Here are the ten worst delusions:
Well it's a bit of a turn up for the books to see Intel designing for power-efficiency but that's exactly what it told the Hot Chips Conference this week.
'Since the middle of last year, and more particularly in the first half of 1975, the member states of the EEC have gone through the severest recession since the war."
So starts a story in the December 10th 1975 edition of Electronics Weekly.
I can't tell you how I got this, or the real name of the CEO who wrote this diary, but it's an interesting insight into the daily routine of a serial CEO i.e. a CEO who is appointed by a company's investors and who typically goes from company to company as the CEO. I have given him the pseudonym 'Ed'.
Which was the best memory chip ever made? Was it Intel's DRAM - the first to be marketed? Or Intel's EPROM, the first to be invented? Or was it Toshiba's block-busting 1Meg DRAM? Or the flash technology which Toshiba invented which was first commercially exploited by Intel? Or was it the Inmos SRAM which knocked Intel out of the SRAM business? Or the Mostek SRAM which became the industry standard? Or was it something else?
Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, legendary former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, kept a collection of newspaper clippings quoting remarks made by company executives during the 1985-6 and 1991-2 semiconductor industry downturns. Here are some:
It seems a bit weird for Intel to be urging its Irish staff, all 4,200 of them, to vote for the Lisbon Treaty when it's put before the Irish people for the second time in October.
A brilliant young scientist once went to work for the world's leading memory company. When a foreign government set up a state-owned IC company, the brilliant young scientist was poached, with his design team, to work for the foreign company.
High IC prices on the back of low capacity are forecast for the next three years. Could the latest rise in DRAM prices signal the start of the trend?
Remember when the stock-backdating issue was all the rage in
Over the years there've been many ingenious schemes for extracting money from managements and investors to pursue what appear to be world-changing technologies. You could call them Techno-Ponzi schemes - you keep getting money from new investors to leverage the progress made on the money thrown away by the old investors. Here they are: The Ten Best Techno-Ponzi Schemes:
The best thing about 3i was its founding ambition - to provide start-up capital for soldiers returning from World War II so they could fund new businesses. The worst thing about 3i was its decision to stop funding start-up businesses.
As if to give the world's taxpayers a kick in the pants as a thank-you for bailing out the world's financial system, it is announced that the highest paid
The indicators just keep on getting better for the semiconductor industry. Fab capacity utilisation is now above 90% for all processes better than 80nm, and for all 300mm wafer processing.
1971 was the greatest year in Intel's history. It launched the world's first 1K DRAM the 1103, it put on sale the world's first microprocessor, the 4004, it introduced the world's first EPROM the 1702, it had its first million dollar revenue month, and it went public in October at $23.50 a share.
Are the wireless networks getting worse? Last week I bought two Pay-As-You-Go dongles for data access. One from Vodafone, one from O2.
In 1985 the semiconductor market fell by over 50 per cent from the level of 1984 and four 64k DRAMs sold for a buck.
Could it be that 2010, 2011 and 2012 will be years of high chip prices? It would be a fine thing if it were to be true, but it would be a foolish thing to expect. Something usually comes along to scupper ASPs.
Not very, judging by the recent bankers' balls-up. And if we look at the solar panel industry - oversupplying its market by 100% this year but still ramping production - you wonder how sane capitalists are.
Well this certainly proves the American sense of humour is alive and well. Thanks to Fortune for it - the ten most stupid apps in the Apple iPhone Apps Store:
According to the Commercial Times of Taiwan, both TSMC and UMC will be at 100% capacity utilisation for 65nm and 55nm processes by November, because of a flood of orders placed on them for ARM-based Netbook chips.
'A monolithic temperature-stabilised voltage-reference IC, which is claimed will out-perform standard zener diodes by a factor of 20, has been developed by National Semiconductor.'
Intel may be wondering what it started when it adopted the slogan 'Sponsors of Tomorrow' for a new advertising campaign.
There's nothing ever good about losing your job but sometimes, as one door closes, another opens. When the
Lyrics from the MIT Songbook contains this magnificent song entitled The Electromagnetic Hymn of the Republic:
With one bound, our hero was free. Suddenly Infineon looks like a different company. Instead of being weighed down by the prospect of paying off a €570 million bond debt next summer, it is debt-free, independent and expansive.
There were once two semiconductor companies which had combined annual sales of $850 million, combined debts of $650 million, and made a combined annual loss of $200 million. Everyone said: 'Let them die'.
Are we going back to the Feudal System? asks Mannerisms Commenter Tom. Almost unbelievably, it turns out, nine American banks which received $125 billion of bail-out money from the US government last year paid out $32.6 billion to staff in bonuses, according to Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney-General for the State of New York.
A year or so ago a friend asked me to buy shares in his company. "What does your company do?" I asked. "It has a technology which converts a message spoken into a mobile phone into a text email and re-transmits it," he said. "But voice recognition technology isn't good enough to do that," I replied.
Thanks to VLSI Research for this one. The top ten suppliers of semiconductor production equipment are:
The 'stay-at-home' economy is boosting the sales of high-tech consumer goods, according to a report from Mintel, which says the
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'Plans for Subscriber Trunk Dialling will give this facility to about 300 exchanges by March next year, serving a quarter of the total subscribers,' is how a story kicks off in the April 12 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.
Of the two big private equity semiconductor buy-outs - NXP by KKR and Freescale by Blackstone - Blackstone looks the more responsible owner.
Very, very tricky this one. What was the most important of the very many important breakthroughs that have made today's IC industry possible?
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