January 2010 Archives

In the early 1900s the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University used to hold raucous annual dinners at which songs were sung by the dons and undergraduates. This is one of them:

Do I want to pay another £30 a month to a network operator?

Do I want to carry around a ten inch screen?

Do I want to read books on a bright screen?

There was once a country which, in 1982, decided that it wanted to have a semiconductor industry and announced a 'Semiconductor Industry Promotion Plan'.

Less is more in the VC world, says a prominent early-stage VC, while a shrinking capital pool should produce better quality investments.

'A classic competitive chip industry knock-out punch' is how TI's decision to build a 300mm fab for analogue was described at IFS 2010, earlier this week.

The fabless are creeping up on the fabbed, now accounting for 23% of the overall semiconductor market. In 1999, the fabless had only a 7% share. Here, thanks to IC Insights, are the top 25 fabless semiconductor companies in 2009.     

Could the IC market be headed back to its traditional 14% CAGR? That was suggested at IFS 2010 in London this morning.

'Elliott Brothers are working on a space research project for the British Government. An announcement by the Elliott Automation Group last Saturday gave this news after Air Ministry authorisation. But beyond this news no-one will say anything.'

So starts a story on the front page of Electronics Weekly's first-ever edition dated September 7^th 1960 which kicked off 50 years of continuous reporting on the electronics industry.

Ed is feeling he needs to do something to assert his authority. What better, he thinks, than to announce a product initiative? He calls the product managers to a meeting to announce his new strategic direction.

Germany looks like providing us with a bit of fun the week after next with the possible, long over-due, clear-out of the Infineon supervisory board.

The world's first electronic stored-programme computer was demonstrated in 1949. It was developed by Manchester University and the demo got a lot of press publicity as an 'artificial brain'.

Want to buy a DRAM company? Want a hole in the head? You'd think it's a no-brainer, but Credit Suisse wants purchase offers in for Hynix before the end of next week.

There was once a government which wanted its country to be a world-class computer manufacturer.

In its legal response to the FTC's anti-trust charges, and specifically in response to the charge that it stifles innovation, Intel lists a number of Intel innovations.

I have to say, when it comes to portables, the opinion of Sanjay Jha, ex-COO of Qualcomm and current CEO of Motorola, is good enough for me.

Plessey Semiconductors, which has been resurrected as the new name for Plus Semi with last month's acquisition of the Plessey-built Roborough fab, was a force to be reckoned with in the world semiconductor industry between 1950 and 1990.

'A production capacity of 1.3 million diodes a year is planned for the Scottish  semiconductor plant for Hughes International (UK) Ltd when it is fully staffed', starts the lead front page story in Electronics Weekly's first-ever edition dated September 7^th 1960, adding: 'The plant was opened by Lord Polwarth at Glenrothes today.'

Ed is feeling troubled since the sacking of company co-founder and CTO Pat Cook. It's not his conscience which is worrying him. It's not the loss of Pat's contribution to the business. It's not the bad feeling caused by forcing Pat out. And it's not even the brutal way the sacking was handled.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a bit thick. What are the 'new technologies of awareness'?

When Fairchild first set up to make transistors it established two teams: one to make NPN transistors under Gordon Moore, and the other to make PNP transistors under the genius Swiss physicist and Fairchild co-founder Jean Hoerni.

There was once an amazing father and son. The father founded the most important computer company in the world. The son founded the most important IC company in the world.

The increasing shortage of manufacturing capacity in the semiconductor industry will finally show up the strategy of going 'fab-lite' as a financiers' sleight-of-hand illusion which will severely damage IDMs, says Europea's leading semiconductor analyst, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons.

Blackberry and Apple continue to revolutionise the wireless industry. Last year, research by Deutsche Bank found that, at a time when Blackberry and Apple had only 3 per handset market share, 35% of the operating profits of the network operators were generated on those two phones.

Graphene just got easier to see. The one-atom-thick material which is the favourite substance to succeed silicon for making electronic components, can now be identified quickly and cheaply instead of by the lengthy and expensive methods of  either atomic-force microscopy (AFM) or scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

There don't seem to be much more than about a dozen chips which can individually command a billion dollar market. Here are the ten biggest (each $1 billion+) markets for individual chip types:

The boss of TI's wireless operation Greg Delagi, sees an almost infinitely extendable future for mobile phones as they morph into 'smart mobile-companions'.

'Space Challenge To Engineers - Tribute to British circuit designers' was a headline in the very first edition of Electronics Weekly produced in 1960, 50 years ago this year.

'How electronics engineers are meeting the technical challenge of instrumentation in research space vehicles was described by a number of speakers last week at the Rocket and Satellite Instrumentation Symposium, organised by the British Interplanetary Society and The Society of Instrument Technology,' is how the story starts.

Ed's diary shows hi is starting the year feeling a bit bruised after getting a warning that some of the VCs might be getting disenchanted with him. However a pleasant chore awaits him.

Although allocation and shortages will not significantly affect IC prices until 2011, Future Horizons, the UK analyst company, reckons that the industry is on the cusp of a structural ASP rise.

ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco next month will contain many wonders but none so wonderful as these:

At the 1994  Electronica, LSI Logic was in fine fettle throwing down what it described as "a challenge to the industry".

There was once a spin-off from Intel which decided to name itself after the manner of its genesis - fashioning  an abbreviation from 'Ex-Intel-Corporation'.

Can bankers and engineers get along together? It was interesting see Frans van Houten, former CEO of NXP, move to the banking group ING.

Is this the year Toshiba finally achieves its ambition of beating Samsung into second place in the NAND flash market?

Thanks to Saxo Bank for this one - its ten 'Black Swan' events for 2010.

NAND scaling has already extended further than expected, but the search for alternative non-volatile memories continues apace. At ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco next month,  progress in a number of alternatives will be presented:

Future Horizons has come up with a forecast of 22% growth for semiconductor sales in 2010. The company emphasises that this is a minimum figure which it expects to see increased as early as next month. Here is how the year will  roll out:

Under the headline: 'Britain's FIRST Electronics Newspaper', Electronics Weekly announced its arrival in this world 50 years ago.

Ed the Serial CEO is looking forward to a brilliant year. At last, he reckons, he's going to make his pile. The company is scheduled to IPO during the year.

Intel's love affair with the new US administration seems to have petered out. Shortly after President Obama was inaugurated, Intel CEO Paul Otellini went to Washington to announce a plan to invest $7 billion in US-based fabs.