Mannerisms

Probably the best thing China could do was done this week, with the announcement of free schooling for university students.

Between glugs of iced pink wine, the odd nap, and the occasional dip down here in the South of France, I read the debut novel of Gene Wilder, the famous American film director and actor.

The Nintendo Wii changed the games market forever, according to J.J Yamaguchi, a board member at NEC Electronics which supplies the graphics controller for the Wii.

The sheer breadth of American eccentricity is breathtaking, as you discover after a few days tucking into the newspapers over here.

“Microelectronics is not unrelated to nature. Of course, it is not a product of nature, but it is a product created by the natural creativity and inquisitiveness of man”, writes Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshina Semiconductor, in his book Chip Management..

After nearly three weeks in America I’m asked what was the best bit, and it has to be breakfast at Kokomo's Surfside Grill on Huntington Beach.

Well it’s Monday morning again and, if you want something to make the world seem a better place, read Gene Wilder’s new novel: ‘The Woman Who Wouldn’t’.

Gated communities seem to me to be a good idea. The only problem with them is that they are currently self-selecting.

Have you tried 2007 Sancerres? My first bottle of 2007 Sancerre tasted fabulous. So good that, as soon as we'd had the first sip, we ordered another case.

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Talking last week abouy STMicroelectronics' plans to return the company to its roots as an analogue house, Carlo Ottaviani, ST's corporate vice president for communications, mused: "No one has ever managed to perfectly replicate the sound made by a Stradivarius violin."

An interesting piece on the US news site Marketwatch by Douglas McIntyre, argues that "Intel's main business has not evolved much since Noyce died." Bob Noyce, co-inventor of the IC, co-founded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and was the founding CEO of both companies. He died in 1990.

Surely that Arthur C Clarke idea of the Space Elevator is something mind-blowingly many years away from reality? Isn't it? Believe it or not, a body called The Japan Space Elevator Association has just published plans how to build one.

It was good to meet a founder-CEO last week. These days so many CEOs seem to be parachuted onto a founding team by the financial backers. This kind of CEO tends to be a cool, financially-savvy, managerial type totally lacking in passion for the company and its products. So that's why it was good to meet Bob Swanson, Founding CEO, now Executive Chairman of Linear Technology.

If you want an object lesson in how to make money in the semiconductor industry, there's no one better to give it than a guy who's been doing just that for 27 years.

As the bringer of Nemesis to the hubristic, there could be no more appropriate character than Gordon Brown.

Sitting at the last presentation before lunch with my attention drifting, my fingers involuntarily type 'wine shop paris' into Google and up comes a list. Suddenly I am all-attention. There is a shop which sells only Bordeaux. and, by the look of it, every Bordeaux.

Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim, died earlier this week, He made his name at Fairchild, as a co-founder of AMD, and at Intersil before founding Maxim Integrated Products which became an outstanding success.

The merger, now underway, of Matsushita and Sanyo is an unusually romantic business story.

See: Ten Point Plan For NXP's Recovery

Challenged by a reader to come up with a ten point plan for the recovery of NXP, I am now thinking, and asking questions, and trying to figure out what could be done. It is a task far beyond my competence so I'd be more than grateful for any suggestions you care to make, either by replying to this post, or by emailing david.manners@rbi.co.uk.

One day the greatest man in the semiconductor industry was asked a question by his wife. Should she invest in a start-up company in Cupertino.

It's clearly going to take genius to fix the world's problems and the question is: Are Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy et al geniuses?

Well my case rests. But here's an engineer who was at TRW and Ball Aerospace with a novel take on how to solve America's problems: http://www.ideasforourfuture.com/

We haven't heard much recently about the CTO of the USA, though it was a big talking point just before the US elections. Is this because the President's choice was Steve Jobs?

Waking up in America yesterday, woozy from jet-lag, I fumble for the remote and turn the telly on. As usual for American TV it's showing an ad. But this is no ordinary ad. The banner headline is: 'Learn how to get your share of the trillion dollar bail-out.'

Last month Dr Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University, New York, and co-inventor of string theory, was in Bristol telling the Festival of Ideas that the impossible is not so impossible as you might think.

My thanks to Brent Przybus of Xilinx for a great new Americanism - the word 'impactful'.  Impactful is a pearl of the genre: you know immediately what it means, it's useful, and it's a concise way of saying: 'it has impact'. One word instead of three, an obvious meaning, and it serves a purpose - the three qualities of a top-flight Americanism.