Mannerisms

It's nice to know you're not alone in incompetence when dealing with life's dilemmas, and foreign hotels rooms, with their multiplicity of unfamiliar switches and plugs, can absorb an awful lot of time in trying to understand how to work the appliances.

Is the semiconductor industry consolidating or de-consolidating? It seems you can take pretty much either view.

Rahul Sud, former Inmos SRAM designer and founding CEO of Lattice Semiconductor, asked one of his fiendishly unanswerable questions at the panel session at Future Horizons' System and SOC Conference in Prague yesterday.

Linear Technology Corporation (LTC) is sticking to its guns of pursuing steady, profitable growth despite the blandishments of Wall Street to go for a high growth strategy.

In 2004, ARM paid nearly a billion dollars for the physical IP company Artisan. Many people said at the time that ARM had overpaid for a company with revenues of $82m.

Sometimes, something comes along which shows you just how awful the tech collapse of 2001 was.

The semiconductor industry is as anarchic, unpredictable and volatile as it ever was, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, told the recent IFS2008

The ears of the proverbial fly on the wall of the Intel boardroom in Santa Clara are burning.

Periodically the semiconductor industry likes to beat itself up and pronounce its inadequacies, but there are usually self-serving reasons for it.

Apologies for rather erratic posting over the last few days due to a move to a new version of the posting software.

The software appears to be stable and understandable and, hopefully, the normal schedule of  7am and 3pm posts will be resumed.

After so many years of being exposed to the chronically loss-making NOR flash market, Spansion's shares are a very affordable $2 apiece.

Was Linear Technology's decision to phase out its involvement in the cellphone and consumer markets when those markets accounted for a third of its revenues as ballsy a play as Intel's decision to get out of DRAM when DRAM accounted for 75 per cent of Intel's business? Probably Yes.

If Dr Wolfgang Ziebart was the kind of guy to indulge in schadenfreude, which I don't for one moment think he is, he would be feeling that he's well out of Infineon whose shares dropped to 1 euro yesterday.

The miserable saga of Rambus drags on as the company makes an enemy of a Delaware judge by destroying relevant evidence.

SEMI, the trade body for the semiconductor production equipment industry, is running a campaign to get the EC to support the microelectronics industry in Europe. Last Friday, SEMI arranged for a visit of EU Glitterati to IMEC.

Q: What's slower than the mating of tortoises? A: The consolidation of the Japanese semiconductor sector.

Japan seems to be sailing through such a sea of red ink and cost-cutting that it is endangering its capacity to operate effectively at the technological leading edge.

If you want to put in your diary a sobering thought for January 1st 2010 (a day when a sobering thought can be useful) it is this:

So what's the way out of the semiconductor industry's problems? Finding renewed growth and better profitability was very much on the agenda at the opening day of the Future Horizons' International Electronic Forum 2009 in Geneva yesterday.

I make a point, during last week's five day stay in Switzerland for IEF 2009 (+ R&R), to say a hearty "Bon Jour" to every Swiss I meet, because they look so miserable, and I assume that a smile and a greeting will cheer them up.

Trotting round Silicon Valley last week, one of the nice things was that everyone has a similar view on Wall Street: It stinks. Some companies have stopped giving quarterly earnings guidance to Wall Street analysts and have replaced it with an annual outlook.

Last week's pair of 'Giving the Finger To Wall Street' posts here and here discussed how Wall Street pressures CEOs into harmful lay-offs and profitless growth. Now, it seems, Wall Street has another harmful effect on semiconductor companies: it pressures them into foregoing long-term R&D. 

The stand-off between Wall Street and the semiconductor industry represented by Wall Street deciding the IC business is low-growth and its shares low-value, and the IC industry's belief that it is poorly served, poorly advised and under-valued by Wall Street, is a recent phenomenon.

Intel's love affair with the new US administration seems to have petered out. Shortly after President Obama was inaugurated, Intel CEO Paul Otellini went to Washington to announce a plan to invest $7 billion in US-based fabs.

Less is more in the VC world, says a prominent early-stage VC, while a shrinking capital pool should produce better quality investments.