Recently in Dilemmas Category

ST-Ericsson has let a few deadlines slip on its new product roadmap as it struggles to make sales from its 'legacy' products. It needs a 28nm-class process for the new products, but it is unclear, as of now, where this is coming from.

It seems a bit rich for a company proposing to spend $12.5 billion on capex this year to be asking other companies, and government institutions, for help in developing a technology which will, mostly, benefit that one company.

The recently appointed CEO of train wreck ST-Ericsson is turning out to be a master of the art of stating the boringly bloody obvious.

There were three 'bold, hairy audacious plays' on the UK semiconductor scene, to quote Icera's founding CEO Stan Boland - Icera, PicoChip and XMOS.

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?

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.

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.

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.

We'll all be selling tickets to Theme Park Europe if we don't start building the new companies of the future, Lawrence Johns of Amadeus Capital Partners told the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs! meeting in Bath last Friday.

"Why am I selling my best image sensors to Apple?" asks Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony and others, notably Samsung, must be wondering why, for so long, they supplied Apple with the wherewithal to thrash them in end product markets.

"The present is at risk," is the telling phrase of Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, as "world-class companies crumble away."

NFC won't become the payment method of choice in the USA, according to the COO of Square, Keith Rabois, adding that the technology "makes for good cocktail chatter."

We'll all be selling tickets to Theme Park Europe if we don't start building the new companies of the future, Lawrence Johns of Amadeus Capital Partners told the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs! meeting in Bath last Friday.

Innovation and growth could be around the corner. Apparently CEO turnover is increasing rapidly, and the reason for it is because shareholders of companies stuffed with cash want new CEOs who can invest that money in innovation and the pursuit of growth.

Japan is nationalising a large chunk of its LCD industry in response to aggressive gains in market share by Taiwanese and Korean competitors.

Interesting to see these top chaps in the US bemoaning the lack of interest in engineering shown by US youngsters. Not one of these glitterati ever mentions the lack of rewarding careers for many engineers in the US.

Interesting revelations are coming out of the Rambus vs Micron and Hynix patent trial in the US.