November 2011 Archives

Has the penny finally dropped in Abu Dhabi that their move into the silicon foundry industry has been poorly executed?

Thanks to Samsung for this one - the result of its 'Office Bugbears' research project to find the ten most annoying things about working in an office. Here they are:

The new boss of ST-Ericsson is in his 50s. The out-going CEO is also in his 50s. Both have 
a list of qualifications as long as your arm but both lack a key ingredient for running a chip company - youth.

Reactors for poorer countries

51 years ago, that was a headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 14^th 1960.

'The Brats are giving me a hard time about increasing cash-flow', writes Ed in his diary referring to the 20-something year-old, super-sharpies who monitor his company for its private equity owners, 'on top of finding $125 million a quarter to fund the interest on the humungeous debt they've put on the company, they're forcing me to find more cash to pay down the capital.'

It doesn't bode well for Nokia-Siemens Networks (NSN) achieving a successful IPO that there were some 500 jobs being advertised on the day it announced it was sacking a quarter of its workforce.

One of the greatest Prime Ministers we never had, Dennis Healey, briefly, very briefly, considered joining the electronics industry.

It's not as bad as you think.  Europe actually has 320 fabs on 265 sites, says Heinz Kundert, President of SEMI, and, this year, the installed fab capacity in Europe will grow by 6% and, next year, SEMI expects it to grow 5%. 300mm capacity in Europe will grow 23% this year and 14% next.

In late 1981, when it launched its 64K DRAM, the company was four years behind the industry leader.

After reports since the summer that GloFo was struggling to achieve yield from its 28nm line at Dresden, it is now reported that AMD has decided to give up on GloFo and go to TSMC for 28nm.

Semiconductor CEOs are making positive noises again. Samsung, Renesas, Qualcomm and AMD say they expect growth in Q4 - against analysts' expectations of a Q4 dip.

Sadly, since the invention of  CMOS programmable logic in the early-80s, there's been no new major product type in the chip industry. Here are the ten major ones:

Although they are friends, the CEOs of Altera and Xilinx preside over one of the keenest rivalries in the semiconductor industry.

Japan Plans £300 Million Electronics Industry.

51 years ago, that was a headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of September 14^th 1960.

'There's trouble with our analogue audio group,' Ed writes in his diary, 'it lost its largest customer some time ago and engineers are leaving to find other jobs expecting the unit will be closed down. They're right, but we have significant development contracts with customers and we'll suffer financially if we don't fulfil them.'

In 1816, Francis Ronalds built an electric telegraph in the garden of his house in Hammersmith. It used clockwork-driven rotating dials, engraved with letters of the alphabet and numbers, at both ends of a circuit. His dials were connected by almost 13km of charged iron wire hung between two wooden frames.

The race is to the highest volume producer, with the lowest costs, and the most advanced technology - just as it always was, says Andrea Cuomo, Senior Vice President at STMicroelectronics.

In 1968 the dominant player in the UK chip industry closed down a chip manufacturing  joint venture with Philips Semiconductors.

Scaling is no longer delivering sufficient cost reduction and there's not much hope of getting back to traditional Moore's Law cost decreases purely by process technology advances, says Joe Sawicki, Vice President and General Manager of the design to silicon division at Mentor Graphics.

Thanks to GQ for this one - the ten worst-dressed execs in high-tech:

Imec sees the $4.4 billion investment by the State of New York in collaboration with TSMC, Globalfoundries, IBM, Intel and Samsung in the College of Nanotechnology at Albany as a complementary initiative to Imec's work on 450mm rather than as a rival group.

GOVT SPONSORING HITS AT FREEDOM OF THE AIR

51 years ago, this was a headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of November 10^th 1960.

'The Brats are putting the squeeze on me for more cash flow,' Ed confides to his diary referring to the 20-something-year-old super-sharpies who monitor his company for its private equity owners, 'not content with us having to find $125 million a quarter to service the debt our private equity masters have imposed on us, The Brats now want more cash to pay down the principal as it matures.'

I once sat on a panel with a wise old Intel owl.

There was once a laboratory which set itself the aspiration if making its country a major player in the chip market.

"This downturn is hitting industrial and communications while most downturns hit computer and consumer," says Dave Bell, CEO of Intersil.

Useless technologies get created all too often, while valued uniqueness is all too rare, says the CEO of Imagination Technologies, Hossein Yassaie.

Here, according to IC Insights, are the top twenty semiconductor  companies measured by 2011 revenues and their precentage growth or decline on the 2010 numbers:                 

Some nodes are good and some are bad. 0.13 micron was one of the worst nodes in history. 0.8 micron eluded everyone except Toshiba for a long time. 90nm and 65nm were good, but 40nm was bad. There's a feeling abroad that 28nm is going to be a good node.

Texas Instruments moves into France

51 years ago, this was the headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of Oct 19 1960.

'We've got to get sales up,' Ed writes in his diary, 'the customers are living off inventory; everyone's  too scared by the macro-economic climate to put orders on us; end markets are looking uncertain. It's a mess.'

After six years as boss of  Sony, and the sacking of around 30,000 people, Sir Howard Stringer's legacy is still a forecast loss of $1.2bn for the financial year to the end of next March.

William Cooke, inventor of a railway telegraph system, and Charles Wheatstone, inventor of the concertina and the portable harmonium, claimed credit for inventing the telegraph.

Commercialisation of Unity Semiconductor's  CMOX passive rewritable crosspoint memory array has been postponed until 2014-2015.

The inventor of the EEPROM left Intel to co-found a chip company in Silicon Valley and then left that company to found his own start-up.

Leading-edge wafer fab capacity is not going to become a commodity item, say analysts Future Horizons. Instead, supply will be limited and longer term supply commitments are the new name of the game. The era of ever-cheaper, freely available wafers is over, at least at the leading edge.

The race is on to get to Zero X, says Freescale's Jean-Christophe Bodet.

Thanks to RecruitingBlogs for this one - the ten worst CEO traits:

'The Queen to launch Britain's first atom sub'

51 years ago, this was a headline in Electronics Weekly's edition of October 19^th 1960.