Intel's famously confrontational culture was waning even when its chief proponent, Andy Grove, was still operational. According to a 2006 article in Forbes, Grove chaired a microprocessor strategy meeting in his last year as Intel Chairman - 2005.
That Apple is now worth more than Microsoft is an extraordinary tribute to genius.
There was once a semiconductor company which was bought by a private equity company.
What will the elite of the American electronics industry do if they come to the conclusion that their products are being made in sweatshops?
Well the Android game-changer has arrived. The Friday before last Robert wrote in about the effect of Mediatek on the Android handset market which was already, in Q1, representing 28% of the smartphone market measured by unit numbers.
Thanks to iSuppli for this one - the figures for the Q1 2010 cellphone market based, not on value, but on the number of phones shipped.
Just as NAND prices fall, Toshiba, the No.2 producer, announces it will invest $5 billion investment in its semiconductor operation for the fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012, with the main part of that going to the fifth NAND fab on its
200 Computers Installed In
50 years ago this year, this was the front page headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 21st 1960.
'At the general managers' meeting today, a thorny issue was raised', Ed writes in his diary, 'it turns out we've had a cease and desist order from a major competitor company, General Linear Corp.'
In 1989
Getting invention from the lab to the factory quickly has been at the very core of the semiconductor industry's success.
In 1983, the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, told how one of his employees had come up with the idea of a personal computer. Bushnell laughed at him. 'We knew all the profits were in mainframes and minicomputers", said Bushnell.
A poor omen for the proposed IPO of NXP is that over half the 13 IPOs of private equity backed companies this year have resulted in losses by those who bought the shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and published in BusinessWeek..
"People don't believe that there's an ASIC company that can receive a spec from you written on a napkin and take it all the way to silicon" says Naveed Sherwani, CEO of Open-Silicon, "most companies want RTL or a Net List, but all that our customers need is the money."
Thanks to iSuppli for this one - their forecast purchases of semiconductors by the top ten OEM buyers:
Why are the potato chip guys smarter than the silicon chip guys?
Mullard Deny Price War
But Mr Carpenter cuts TV tube prices
50 years ago this year, this was a headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 14th 1960, presaging 50 years of component price wars.
'We've got a really brilliant initiative coming off', Ed confides to his diary, 'we've had some fantastic contacts with the e-Reader people, which is a red hot market, and are designing a chip which will take a mega amount of cost out of the system.'
Allocation and lengthening lead-times drive the grey market. But the danger of the grey market is that the markings on an IC package may not truly represent the silicon inside.
KKR, the company which bought NXP in 2006 and loaded it up with $6 billion of debt, got its big break courtesy of Steve Jobs.
Now here's a pretty how de do. The good old Abu Dhabians, who bailed out AMD when it was staggering under massive debts incurred in its $5.4 billion purchase of ATI, have had sand thrown in their eyes by the
There was once a brilliant engineer who worked for Zilog. But, as is the way with brilliant engineers, he found time to do a little moonlighting, and he found a welcoming home to moonlight at LSI Logic.
No wonder Steve Jobs is getting shirty about Android. Phones using the upstart OS are outselling the iPhone, according to
Will LTE happen quickly? No one knows. You'd think it judging by the rapid rise in data traffic driven by video, but the operators are investing in infrastructure at historically low levels.
Last week we had Gartner Dataquest's list of top OEM spenders on semiconductors last year. This week, here are iSuppli's Top Ten OEM Semi Spenders for 2009:
You can design and tape out a MEMS device for under $100,000, and bring it to market for $5 million.
50 years ago this year, in the September 14th 1960 edition of Electronics Weekly, there was a headline: 'World's Largest Stereo Network From Japan'.
"Looking through our recurring costs I notice there's a monthly sum for catering'. Ed confides to his diary, 'it's not a lot, but since I never entertain on-site I wonder, who does?'
The whole 450mm wafer thing is a puzzle. Last week at IEF 2010, there was TSMC's CTO Jack Sun, saying he wanted and expected 450mm to happen while, listening to him in the audience, was Heinz Kundert, European CEO of SEMI whose members make the chip manufacturing equipment, who said later: "We don't want it."
The worst shock the US semiconductor industry ever suffered was in 1981 when HP publicly declared that the quality of Japanese 64K DRAMs was better than US manufactured 64K DRAMs.
Why is the SIA talking the industry down? "The SIA's job is to collect information, analyse it and draw conclusions, but their analysis is on the level of the kindergarten," said Malcolm Penn, CEO of UK analysts Future Horizons at the company's International Electronics Forum 2010 in
Once upon a time there were two teams of friends who founded two semiconductor companies at about the same time.
With half the world's population living in cities, and the prospect of six and a half billion city-dwellers by 2050, the authorities have got to find ways of controlling urbanites' behaviour.
The American have got a problem. They're getting stressy and bad-tempered with each other, and I think I know the answer to it.
Thanks to Gartner Dataquest for this one - the ten biggest OEM/ODM consumers of semiconductors in 2009.
Handling an iPad in the Apple store in
50 years ago this year, in the September 14th 1960 edition of Electronics Weekly, there was this entry under the heading 'Quotes Of The Week':
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