In his book SPINOFF, Charlie Sporck, legendary CEO of National Semiconductor, reports on how National's memory boss, Bob Johnson, recollected the crash of 1984/5 when all the US companies, except TI and Micron, exited the DRAM business.
Where does technology come from these days?
There was once a start-up company which opened for business in October and got its first order in December.
What on earth is going on at IM Flash - the NAND joint venture between Micron and Intel?
Thanks to Caris & Co for this - the ten best funded privately-owned semi companies:
An interesting yarn is told in Andy Hertzfeld's book: 'How the Mac was made'.
There was once a genius who set out his life goals early on:
At Mobile World Congress 2010 in February, the wireless network operators were asking that the big mobile data generators - Google, Facebook, YouTube etc should pay the operators money for the Internet traffic they generate.
Another chapter unfolds in the grisly tale of NXP. Yesterday the Sound Solutions unit, which had annual revenues of $255 million, was sold.
If the ARM guys have been getting a little feisty of late, now we know the reason why. Microsoft has given them the biggest Christmas present they could ever hope for - a port of Windows to ARM.
Here they are: the ten best CEOs currently serving in the chip industry:
What will GloFo do without a Morris Chang?
First Computer for finance
50 years ago today, in the December 21st 1960 issue of Electronics Weekly, this was the headline on a Page 7 story.
IMEC has done something pretty amazing in fabricating III-V structures on silicon wafers.
Funny that Goldman Sachs is taking such a swipe at Wintel. Usually Wall Street's Vampire Squid likes to stay on the side of the big battalions.
In 1957
Good old stock market traders - they're as excitable as girls sometimes. The NXP share price shot up from $12-ish to $18-ish on news of the NFC Android software stack developed with Google for use in NXP's NFC controller.
One of the greatest-ever figures in the high-tech industry has a favourite expression: "It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy."
Following the
Funny thing the grapevine. You hear something from a colleague returning from a meeting. Then you hear it at a conference hotel bar. Then you see it on an Internet chat page. And then someone mentions it in public at a public meeting and it's all over the place.
Thanks to Gartner for this one -the top ten IC suppliers in 2010 were:
We all know now that 2010 came in as a 34% growth year. But what were forecasters saying at the beginning of 2010?
High power transistors next month
Suddenly you can see why things went tits up for semiconductor industry customers last year - the market grew over 30% but fab capacity grew only 8%, according to SEMI, the trade body for the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry.
'Tis the Season of Forecasts for the New Year and Reviews of Last Year, so I am very grateful to Mike Cowan, inventor of the Cowan LRA Model for forecasting the IC industry, for the following resume of what happened in 2010 and what is in store for 2011.
Ted Hoff, the inventor of the microprocessor, was Intel's 12th employee. The company was incorporated in July 1968 and Hoff joined in September.
Not that old chestnut again - the fire/power outage/factory screw-up which interrupts memory supply. I thought we'd never hear it again.
The world's first 1k MOS memory was produced not by Intel, not by Motorola, not by Mostek, but by Cogar Corporation which had technology licensing deals with GI, TI and Fairchild and a team of engineers largely recruited from IBM.
Tablets are the darling of the industry. They are expected to grow at an average annual rate of 131% for the next five years, says IC Insights.
Well this explains a heck of a lot. According to the
These are the ten best things which have not yet been invented:
Once again it's that pain-in-the-bum task - writing Christmas cards.
Tunnel diodes creep into use so quietly
50 years ago today, in the December 7th 1960 issue of Electronics Weekly, this was the headline on the 'American Letter' column.
KPMG, the accountancy and consultancy firm, has surveyed the chip industry and found that 78% of its respondents expect 6% growth in 2011.
Here's a challenge: How do you create a competitive European market for roaming?
After graduatiing from the Politecnico di Torino, Pistorio went on the milk round doing job interviews. "I had ten interviews and got ten offers," he recalls, " my intention was to accept the offer of Olivetti but, quite by accident, I had known a gentleman who was the representative of the Motorola agent in
We may look back on the end of the Noughties as the time when e-addiction took hold.
In 1968, a TI-er created a 'core-killer' - a 256bit MOS RAM. But TI management took the view that the core-killer technology would be thin-film memory and that MOS was an unreliable technology.
The mobile phone is having some disruptive effects - first the Tom Toms and Garmins of this world look like being replaced by in-phone GPS, now Mastercard and Visa could be about to get the same treatment as Samsung gears up an NFC technology to, apparently, enable payment-by-phone.
"A fab-lite strategy is a no-cash strategy - a consequence of not having the money to build a fab," says Jean-Francois Fau, President of Europe for Texas Instruments, which has recently acquired six new fabs which are in various stages of either producing, being prepared to produce, or waiting to be equipped.
Thanks to the Global Financial Centres Index for this one. The top ten financial centres in the world today are:
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