June 2011 Archives

Once upon a time, when the IC industry was all about processors and memories, Three Wise Men who knew how to make them came up with a scheme to get funding for a new semiconductor company.

The train crash called ST-Ericsson gets bloodier and weirder. Its latest round of restructuring - the fourth in less than three years - is blamed on "reduced demand for legacy products".

Will LED prices fall by 90% by 2015? Will LEDs account for 50% of all general purpose lighting by 2016?

 Thanks to IC Insights for this one - the top ten silicon vendors in Q1 + the next ten:

Ordinary people often have more sense than the elite and, hopefully, the Greeks will vote against the austerity package tomorrow. Today's 48 hour strike is a good start. Why should the Greeks accept 30 years of debt service to pay for the mistakes of bankers and the politicos who are supposed to regulate them?

'The Brats can be useful sometimes', Ed confides to his diary (the Brats are his name for the 20-something super-bright martinets who monitor investments for the private-equity owners of Ed's company), 'they've come up with this super cost-saving wheeze.'

Every day, more silly ways to save the planet are proposed. Which is the silliest?

In his book 'Chip Management', the great CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, states the four principles which he formulated on becoming the head of the company:

That super-nice guy in the Apple store doesn't find you particularly sympathetic - he's just implementing 'APPLE' - an acronym for the steps which an Apple store employee should use in dealing with customers.

In days of yore when men were men and silicon was silicon, there was a start-up company where the founders received a 500x return on their investment within two years.

Apparently 4% of CEOs are psychopaths. That's 4x the percentage of psychopaths in the population as a whole. Thanks to Robert Hare there is a check-list for judging if someone is a psychopath e.g. he enjoys firing people, he lies, lacks guilt or remorse, has an inflated sense of self-worth, lacks self-control, is easily bored, irresponsible, impulsive and promiscuous. Does it sound familiar?

Is graphene the replacement for silicon? Well some people don't think so. "The prospect (of it replacing silicon) is so far beyond the horizon that we cannot even assess it properly," says Professor Andre Geim who won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year for discovering graphene.

Thanks to VLSI Research for this one - the top ten suppliers of IC manufacturing equipment last year.

Well here was an opportunity. 50 years ago, the February 1^st 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly carried this ad:

'It's becoming increasingly difficult to come up with $125 million a quarter to service the debt which our private equity owners have put on the company,' writes Ed, 'so I've been looking around for ways to reduce our cash outflow, and I think I've found one.'

This subject has brought in some interesting comments in the last few weeks. So now's the chance to decide: What Has Done Most To Make British Life Worse?

The greatest IC designer the industry ever saw, Bob Widlar,  reckoned that analogue IC design was the apogee of  the semiconductor industry and that digital design was a down and dirty activity which didn't need much talent.

Many people think Globalfoundries has a problem - it's too secure. All that Abu Dhabi money has dispelled the sense of urgency that a semiconductor start-up needs to establish itself. Too much security can be a negative.

There was once a microprocessor start-up with only £1.75 million of start-up capital. It couldn't afford to make a chip.

Could the AMD board have made the mistake of the century in ousting Dirk Meyer?

Three people have already turned down the job of AMD CEO, according to Bloomberg. They are Pat Gelsinger formerly of Intel; Mark Hurd, formerly of HP and Greg Summe md of Carlyle Group.

You don't expect the Italians to be organised but their up-coming spectrum auction is unsurpassed as an example of the Italian genius for chaos.

"His habits seem good, his disposition active and cheerful and his manner intelligent."

Is this someone's description of his Cocker Spaniel?

Unbelievably it's a description of Michael Faraday.

'Bloody pension fund,' moans Ed in a diary entry, 'it's taking a huge chunk of money every year to keep this up to the required statutory funding level. It makes it all the more difficult to make my interest payments on the debt the PE owners have put on the company.'

No wonder Intel's getting all fired up about its process technology - announcing both an acceleration in it process geometry roadmap a switch to Finfets at 22nm - the reason is: it has nowhere else to go now that both more speed and more cores are ruled out of the company's technology roadmap.

It's funny to think of it now, but before the IBM PC became ubiquitous there were loads of different computers with a variety of operating systems and processors often made by entrepreneurial companies only a few years old.

Would Intel benefit from following AMD's lead and spinning off its fabs as a foundry business?

There was once a very great CEO who pioneered the manufacturing of germanium transistors.

The Ultrabook. Funny name. Funny idea. The Ultrabook, a thin notebook, is part of what Intel CEO Paul Otellini calls its mission to 're-invent the PC'.

The social networking craze could be killed stone dead if lawyers are allowed to use it to serve writs.

The SuVolta approach to reducing leakage looks attractive because it adopts a new approach - looking at levelling up the variations in the threshold voltage of transistors.

'Don't go West young man   . . .' is the headline on a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of May 10^th 1961.

'These European lay-off costs are horrendous - there must be a way of getting them down,' Ed confides to his diary, 'today I called in the lawyer and the head of HR.'

Nokia's fall from grace is worrying the Finns. Nokia accounts for 14% of Finland's exports and 1.5% of its GDP.

Jean Hoerni, one of the Fairchild Eight who went on to found Intersil, Union Carbide Semiconductor and Amelco, always allowed his engineers to 'steal' money, according to Bo Lojek's great History of Semiconductor Engineering.

The news that Microsoft is saying that its Windows 8 tablet OS requires chip-makers to restrict their IC designs to one tablet design each, is the biggest piece of industry cheek since Intel went sole-source on the x86.

Once upon a time there was a company which wanted to build an advanced electronic calculating machine.

In probably the most outrageous initiative since Wintel to control the semiconductor industry, Microsoft is said to be planning to give incentives to chip makers who make ICs for tablets using Windows 8, to confine their ICs to a single tablet design.

Can ARM really get into 50% of all mobile computers by 2015?

Thanks to the World Economic Forum for this one - the top ten countries for the use of computing and communications technology in 2010.