March 2010 Archives

Here's a big shock: An American private equity company is planning to put up a 4G wireless telephone network in the US.

There are so many silly ways being proposed to save the planet. Here are the ten silliest:

As lead-times lengthen and prices rise, there is inevitable pressure on IC manufacturers to increase capacity. This they are resisting.

Under the tag: 'Quote of the Week' in the first edition of Electronics Weekly 50 years ago this year, dated September 7^th 1960, was this remark from a speech given by Sir George Thomson to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

'Trouble again', Ed confides to his diary, 'in order to cut down our admin costs, I started a dialogue with our biggest distributor about him taking on all our distribution business at a lower margin, while we cut out our other disties. Having to deal with only one distributor outlet means I can cut down on our HQ staff, while we retain a bigger percentage of the sales revenues.'

EUV is taking a lot longer to get together than expected. Back in 1997, Intel Founder, Chairman and former CEO, Dr Gordon Moore, gave a lunch in London to talk about setting up a consortium to pursue the technology.

It's amazing how long-lived some niche technologies are. Ferro-electric RAM, SOI, phase-change memory have each knocked around for over 30 years without ever really going anywhere, but always promising to become mainstream.

There was once a computer entrepreneur who founded his company in 1951, had $3 billion in revenue and 40,000 employees in the 1980s, appointed his son President in 1986, and fired his son in 1989 after a series of disasters.

Wireless capex has declined, is declining, and will continue to decline.

There's an exuberance about the Yanks which no other nation can match. When Google said it would connect up a US city with a Gbit/sec fibre network, for free, the Mayor of Topeka promptly renamed his city Google - for the month of March.

Well this is very arguable but here, stretching from Julius Lilienfeld's 1926 patent filing for a solid state amplifier, through to Robert Dennard's field-effect transistor memory, are the ten most influential semiconductor scientists.

Chip manufacturers continue to play a canny game, holding back on capex while enjoying the higher prices that follow shortages.

50 years ago this year, Electronics Weekly was launched. The leading article in the launch edition date September 7^th 1960 touched on a subject which has been debated repeatedly in the half century since EW was born - can the UK translate success in R&D into success in manufacturing?

'Motivation. Leadership. Dynamism', confides Ed to his diary, 'this is what I bring to the company. I've developed a scheme to galvanise the sales team.'

Samsung, for many years the No.2 semiconductor manufacturer, is expected to be the No.2 user of semiconductors in 2010.

Was there ever a time when the semiconductor industry could have brought supply and demand into balance?

One of the remarkable things about technology evolution is that the TV and the PC have remained separate products despite many attempts to merge them. So what hope has the latest attempt from Google, Intel, Logitech and Sony to make them interchangeable?

There was once a group of CEOs who got so excited about the prospects for data communications over wireless links that they paid stupid amounts of money to buy spectrum.

What costs $500, has no innovative functions, has been seen by very few people and attracted orders for 120,000 units in the first day it was put on sale?

Thanks to Strategy Analytics for this one - the top seven suppliers of baseband chips for mobile phone handsets.

Big Developments In Toroids

UK Firm Doubles Output Capacity.

This was a headline 50 years ago this year, when the September 7^th 1960 edition of Electronics Weekly pointed up the UK's leading place in toroid developments.

Jon Howes, the high-tech entrepreneur and founder of the design company NeUW, has come up with a way to save us from the plague which affects all our lives - the knock on the door on Saturday morning heralding the arrival of the guy who's come to read the meter.

'At a meeting of semiconductor CEOs in Munich,' Ed confides to his diary, ' I meet a very switched on guy who told me he had a new kind of memory technology with ten year data retention and 100,000 write/erase cycles, and licenses were going very inexpensively because they needed a final tranche of development money.'

Everyone knows Q1 is a shitty quarter. Q3 is usually the best quarter, Q4 is the second best quarter, Q2 bumbles along flattish - but Q1 is usually the worst. Well, maybe not Q1 2010.

Don Hoefler, who coined the term Silicon Valley, recounted a low-spot in the Valley's history in the November 22^nd 1975 edition of his newsletter called Microelectronics News.

For donkeys years automatic translation has been five to six years away. In many ways it has been a good example of a Techno-Ponzi scheme - appearing almost within the grasp if technologists, so allowing technologists to raise large sums of development cash to go the last mile.

There was once a genius engineer who was employed by Zilog, but moonlighted at LSI Logic.

I have to say the sheer cheek of BT's latest WiFi dongle scam made me giggle a bit. I bought the dongle from Maplin's to transform my old PC into a bedroom iPlayer.

Like a twit I installed the software which came with the dongle. Then up came a message from BT offering to connect me to my own Hotspot for £5 a day.

Acer is leading the charge in the PC market, growing 21% last year, and taking the No.2 slot from Dell in Q4.

It's good to see innovation taking place in programmables. This is a product area which has remained stuck in a $3 billion market niche for a decade. Silicon Valley start-up TierLogic today announces a route to bringing down programmables' costs which may kick-start growth in the sector.

Thanks to www.toptentopten.com for this one - the ten greatest geniuses in the history of the human race:

Energy harvesting from vibration and heat differentials are generating commercial operations. Micropelt, a spin-off from Infineon, and Nextreme Thermal Solutions are converting heat differentials into electricity, while Perpetuum, Lumedyne Technologies and MicroGen are generating electricity from vibrations.

50 years ago, this year, a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 7^th 1960 carried this headline. The sub-headline read: 'New British Factory Is World's Largest.'

'After reading in the papers that Goldman Sachs regularly culls its bottom 10% performers, and remembering from Jack Welch's 'Straight from the Gut' that this was also the practice at GE, I decide this would be a useful discipline to bring to the company', writes Ed in his diary.

This week sees another contender enter the ring for the emerging 3D FPGA market tussle. TierLogic will reveal on Wednesday what it has been working on in stealth mode since 2003.

The prime mover in getting AMD founded was not Jerry Sanders but Jack Gifford. Gifford, 28 years old when he left Fairchild, couldn't raise the money to get the company started.

What can you get for the cost of an Olympic Games? Answer: A transition to 450mm wafers. Both cost between $25 billion and $30 billion. 

There were once two guys who became hugely rich by building and selling the most famous microcomputer ever built.

Getting caught in a heavy snowstorm while visiting a pub or three, recently, I was surprised to find that my new, snazzy, nautical-style jacket was soaked through in seconds.

January is usually a poor month for semiconductor sales, usually recording a drop on December, usually heralding a Q1 which is down on the previous year's Q4.

Thanks to Google for this one: What was the most searched on item in the UK in each year of the past decade? Here's Google's answer:

Very, very bad news to hear that Intel No.2 exec Sean Maloney had a stroke yesterday. But good news to hear that the prognosis is 'excellent'.

'Hydraulic Hi-Fi'

was a headline 50 years ago in the edition of Electronics Weekly of September 14^th 1960.

Ed the Serial CEO hits a problem. In this week's diary entry he discloses that he's just discovered that his shares don't fully vest until two years after the date proposed for the IPO.