December 2011 Archives

Fifteen years ago, eminent businessmen were warning that Europe had to adjust to the rise of China.

January should see the ARM-based £16 computer, the Raspberry Pi, go into production.

At a time when no foreign company had ever been allowed to build a fab in Japan, there was an American company which was extremely persistent in its efforts to get the Japanese authorities to give approval.

Intel's trial on anti-trust charges due to start in February has been halted by a US federal judge in Delaware while Intel lawyers prepare to argue for a summary dismissal of the case.

Here they are: The Ten Most Interesting Questions for 2012:

'It's Moving Day For Texas'

This was a  headline, 50 years ago, in Electronics Weekly's edition of February 15th 1961.

'The Post Office are to build a ground station with a large steerable aerial system to gain experience of communications satellites. This was announced last week by the Post-Master General in a speech (read in his absence) at the Annual Dinner of the Telecommunications Engineering Manufacturers Association in London.'

So, 50 years ago, starts a story in the March 1^st 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

When you look at the sorry tale of NXP - the old Philips Semiconductors operation which was sold to private equity -  it's good to remember the days when Philips Semis was the star in the Philips firmament.

The DRAM industry is a long time consolidating. Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron, says, earlier this week, he expects consolidation. He probably has his eye on Nanya with whom Micron shares a joint development agreement and a jv in Inotera.

There was once a company which spun out of Seeq which had spun out of Intel and set out to make E².

Chris Rowen, founder and CTO of Tensilica, is a big picture man in the high-tech industry. Here's what he sees as the four significant developments in 2011 and the four major trends in 2012.

Interesting to hear European industrialists speculating on the break-up of the eurozone. How recently would that have been unthinkable?

Here they are: The Ten Best Semiconductor CEOs of 2011:

So RIM could go even more disastrously astray by delaying its Blackberry 10 to the end of 2012 and possibly beyond.

This was the headline, 50 years ago, on the front page story of the March 1^st 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

'Growth, growth,' Ed doodles in his diary, 'growth - The Brats want growth, but it's hellish hard to get when our private equity owners have put a mountain of  debt on us which keeps on maturing so we have to pay off capital every eighteen months as well as ruinous amounts of interest every quarter.'

Broadcom will "close the gap" with Qualcomm in the baseband market within a couple of years, Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor tells the Wall Street Journal.

We tend to think that debt is a recent aberration but, back in 1998, the Asian Contagion led to several Asian countries requiring the bail-out services of the IMF.

AMD making ARM a processors is one of those tectonic shift things. The story has been around for a while but, earlier this week,  the new AMD CEO Rory Read gave it  fresh legs.

36 years ago, hit by the plummeting calculator price, a New Mexico calculator company was about to go bust.

As always, process technology leadership is under debate. Is Intel way

ahead? Some think so.

Here, according to IHS iSuppli are the top ten PC vendors in Q3:

TI is shipping less ICs than its customers are using with disties preferring to run down their inventories than keep their stocks up.

A move towards an integrated civil and military ATC system, and increasing use of computers and automatic data processing were features of the Memorandum accompanying the 1961-2 Air Estimates, presented by Mr Julian Amery, Secretary of State for Air, last week.

So, 50 years ago, starts a story in the March 1^st 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

'There are many benefits to being wife-less,' Ed confides to his diary, 'no credit card bills, no visits from her friends and relations, no questions, no moaning, but the downside is the absence of  rumpy-pumpy.'

Psion started life as a software publisher but founder, David Potter, always wanted to make his own products.

How much money is Intel pouring into its UltraBooks? No one outside Intel knows. But you can bet it's massive.

32 years ago a big company paid $380 million for a chip company. It seemed a bargain when, the following year, the chip company had sales of $370 million. But then things went wrong.

Things are getting tough at RIM: the failure of its tablet; outages on its Blackberry service; a share price down 70% on the year, and mass terminations.

With its acquisition of National, TI has now got 17% of an analogue market valued at $42 billion, Heinz-Peter Beckemeyer, EMEA director for analogue marketing, told a meeting in London yesterday.

Thanks to OSXDaily for this one - the ten biggest things Apple is worth more than:

'General de Gaulle officially opened the new ATC and CCTV installations at Orly Airport on Friday. The CSF diversity type radars use English Electric magnetrons.'

So, 50 years ago, starts a story in the March 1^st 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

'The Brats are giving me grief,' 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 having to find $125 million a quarter to service the debt the owners have loaded on us, and not content with making us hold back cash to pay these debts as they mature, they're now complaining that the company isn't growing.'

A few years back you couldn't go anywhere without hearing someone say: 'Advanced digital CMOS is now a commodity - available in any foundry'.

One of those weird things about consumer electronics is that pocket TVs never took off. Pocket radios were a huge; pocket music players were stonking sellers;  pocket telephones are a ginormous market; but no one ever really wanted a pocket TV.

Intel will have sales of $49.7 billion in 2011, up from $40.4 billion in 2010, giving it 15.9% of the total semiconductor market, says IHS iSuppli, and a 6.5% market share lead over second placed Samsung.

There was once a company making x86 microprocessors in Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara.

So Cortex A15 is here and it will double the performance of  the A9. Samsung is sampling a dual core A15 running at 2GHz on a 32nm process and plans volume production in Q2 2012.