September 2009 Archives

You could have knocked me down with a feather to see xG Technology raise its head above the parapet again, this time by announcing, earlier this week, it had made a profit of over $1 million on $8 million revenues for the first half of the year.

Thanks to iSuppli for this one - the top ten MEMs suppliers to the automotive industry last year.

'A major advance in the fabrication of integrated circuits has been achieved by Bell Telephone Laboratories by the development of an Electron Beam Exposure System, known as EBES.'

So starts a story in the October 8^th 1975 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Maybe the phone manufacturers will accomplish what the wireless operators are incapable of achieving for themselves: massive increases in wireless data traffic.

TSMC is to start cranking out Atoms in Q4, according to DigiTimes, and is expected to reach 6k wafers a month by the end of the year and 35k wpm next year.

With the end of the G-20 conference, with nothing much decided on, it's time for us to face up to an unwelcome fact: whether it's the, G-7, G-8, G-20, Davos, Bilderberg, the UN or any other convocation of powerful people, nothing useful is going to come from it.

The inspiration  for starting Psion was the 1970s invention of the microprocessor. "It was obviously going to have the most profound impact on the world, and here was my opportunity to participate in a phenomenon of great importance," says David Potter,  "say you were a painter - think what it would have been like to have been an Impressionist, in 1870, in Paris".

Good news for the awaited ARM-based Netbook roll-out is that IBM has gone in with Canonical to make the latter's Ubuntu Linux operating system and IBM applications software available for Netbooks.

There was once an oddball who cleverly persuaded his boss to get into the computer business by selling him the idea while the boss was watching a ballet performance - the boss's favourite spectator activity.

What a can of worms the Schumacher trial in Munich is uncovering.

Thanks to Semicast Research for this one. The top ten suppliers of semiconductors into the industrial market in 200, with their market shares, were:

'A new type of parallax-free electronic rifle sight which is claimed to give a far higher ratio of hits than a conventional sight has been developed by the Swedish firm of Ampoint AB, Milmo. It is based on an invention by Helsingborg engineer Arne Ekstrand.'

So starts a story in the October 8^th 1975 edition of Electronics Weekly.

The difficult thing to understand about the EC anti-trust case against Intel is why did Intel take such an aggressive stance about it?

This is the third entry selected from the diary of Edward Rushbridger, (a nom de plume to protect the author) which fell into my hands recently. Previous entries can be found here and here. Ed is the type of CEO who goes from company to company at the behest of venture capitalists or private equity backers.

ARM's hard macro version of its Cortex A9, called Osprey, has been received by many as the processor that will challenge Atom for the Netbook/Smartbook/MID/UltraMobileComputing (whatever you like to call it) market.

In 1970, Toshiba started to get involved with CMOS.  "For Toshiba, which was late in introducing the previous generation NMOS technology, trying to get a head start in CMOS was critical", writes Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, later CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, in his book Chip Management.

It's very good to hear that Pasquale Pistorio, the great former CEO of STMicroeletronics, will be publicly interviewed at the International Electronics Forum in Geneva the week after next.

54 years ago there was a company which was the No.1 vacuum tube manufacturer in the world and the seventh largest transistor maker, having accomplished that difficult transition with rare success.

The banks have shown they can destroy the Western World's economic system. Can they be prevented from doing so?

Here's an interesting wheeze posted today by the Chief Information Officer of the USA on the White House web-site: the US government is to have an Apps Store.

Thanks to Rene Penning de Vries, chief technology officer of NXP Semiconductors, for this one - the top ten challenges facing society today:

There has been much talk of the 'game-changing' nature of the entry of the Abu Dhabi-backed Globalfoundries into the semiconductor industry, but the guys from the Gulf will have to do much more if they are to have a significant effect on the industry.

'Industry standardisation on a 16-pin 4k RAM came one step closer last week with the announcement that Intel Corporation now has commercial availability of its 4096-bit dynamic MOS RAM (2104).'

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition on October 8^th 1975.

CEO Paul Otellini is to spend more time on strategic planning, CTO Pat Gelsinger and chief counsel Bruce Sewell are leaving the company, and the technology and manufacturing activity is put under the control of former CFO Andy Bryant. This was the gist of Intel's reorganisation announced today.

Hopefully all will go well for Dr Ulrich Schumacher in his trial which opened in Munich today.

Has Sanjay Jha been typically clever? As co-CEO of Motorola since August 2008, he's been struggling with a cellphone business which is losing a fortune, down to 5% market share (from 20+ in 2007) and which Motorola failed to sell last year.

In the mid-60s, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, later to be CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, was appointed a section manager at a transistor manufacturing plant in Tamagawa.

"How do you go from no activity to frenetic activity?" asked the ASML guy I phoned yesterday to see if the company could meet soaring demand for immersion scanners.

When the 20^th century was young, a 23 year-old official with the local electricity utility in Osaka pondered on the inadequacy of the single power plug in most domestic premises.

Could Toshiba be going fabless? It seems unimaginable, but an official Toshiba spokeswoman, Hiroko Mochida, said earlier this week that Toshiba is considering out-sourcing 28nm chips where demand exceeds Toshiba's capacity.

Will the expected Globalfoundries take-over of Chartered create a real competitor to TSMC?

Thanks to the French analytical specialist house DECISION for this one, taken from their World Electronics Industries 2008-2013 report. Here are the world's ten leading camcorder manufacturers.

Oh Dear. Skype looks as if it is going to be no more. For many of us, Skype was an absolute saving grace when abroad. It meant you could phone home without having to pay the outrageous roaming charges of wireless network operators or the equally outrageous surcharges imposed by hotels.

This was the headline of a front page story in Electronics Weekly's edition of October 8^th 1975 during one of the early semiconductor downturns.

The story opens: 'Texas Instrument, Manton Lane, Bedford is to make 150 employees redundant as a result of the continuing recession in the UK and a consequent lowering of demand for its products'.

If you want to put in your diary a sobering thought for January 1st 2010 (a day when a sobering thought can be useful) it is this:

The thing which made Intel was the IBM PC design win. And the thing which got the IBM design win was Operation Crush which came in response to a growing momentum in the market towards Motorola's 68000.

The Europeans aren't very good at this management thing when it comes to high technology. If you're looking for someone to be head of a big wireless company you should look at what you're up against, and find someone feist-ier, balls-ier and, preferably, younger than the competition.

There was once a very large company which made cars, but which diversified into many businesses, including the semiconductor business. It ended up owning around half a dozen medium-sized semiconductor companies.

As I mentioned before, although I can't tell you the application, a couple of mates and me are developing an iPhone App.

Sharp looks as though it's got the Netbook message with a 6 inch by 4 inch clamshell device running Ubuntu, weighing 400 grams, booting in three seconds and running for ten hours on a charge.

It's awful to see dedicated and skilled engineers let down by their management. Nowhere does this happen with more depressing regularity than at Infineon.

'Siliconix first set up a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Swansea in 1969 using an old rambling Victorian mansion house. Although having many drawbacks, the four years spent there helped mould the image of the company as it is today'.

So starts a story in the December 10^th 1975 issue of Electronics Weekly.