Mannerisms

Had it not been for lower than expected prices, the semiconductor industry would have grown 20 per cent this year, says Future Horizons. As it is, the market looks to have grown ten per cent.

This is the final entry on this site for 2006, a year in which WiMAX stuttered, UWB faltered, Near Field Communication struggled to establish itself, RFID established itself, WiFi strengthened strongly and extended its scope, cellular telephony garnered oodles of dosh but lacked direction as high-end phones failed to find market favour, AMD and Texas Instruments flourished, and Intel wilted.

ASIC design may come to end to an end at 45nm, killed by rising cost and lengthening time-to-market.

Analogue chips have been doing well, with companies like Linear Technology Corporation making 78 per cent margins, and the market's set to get better this year, but where will the designers come from?

A couple of floors below where Bill Gates was delivering his keynote to the 40th Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last night, newly married couples and tourists were being ferried around canals on gondolas.

Hearing a Bill Gates keynote for the first time is an experience, especially if it’s shared with 3,500 people.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) have produced a pack of playing cards on each of which was an interesting fact about CES.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) believes that consumers are turning into early, or at least earlier, adopters.

Michael Dell blamed the telecom industry, at CES, for holding up the development of the digital home and challenged the industry to accelerate the deployment of fibre to the home.

LEDs are the future of lighting. Or are they? One person who is banking that they will be is the CEO of NXP Semiconductors, Frans van Houten.

The most remarkable marketing guy is operating out of a shanty bar across the road from the famous Mullins Beach Bar (now called Mannie’s Suga Suga) which is
a kilometre or two south of Speightstown on the west coastal road of Barbados.

It’s January. April is a couple of months away. Skies are grey. But 2007 is going to be a good year, according to IFS2007, a seminar run by analysts Future Horizons in London this week.

There was Bill Gates on the telly on Wednesday morning telling the Sky News interviewer that Microsoft does what it can to make the price of its products uniform in the different countries in which it sells them across the world.

Why do companies confine themselves to the descendants of Hitler, Attila, Stalin Genghis and Mao for designing websites?

‘Delivering supply chain solutions’ was written on the side of the truck outside the office on Wednesday. What could be inside? Answer: It was a general delivery truck belonging to a carrier delivering all and sundry to all and sundry. Supply chain solutions indeed!

Is the industry consolidating or de-consolidating? Recently I had a discussion on the topic with John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Tremendous change is on the way in the high-tech industry which means that everything is continuing as normal, it was said at the opening of the Future Horizons IEF 2007 meeting which started at 8:30 this morning at a hotel on a beach south of Athens.

A cracking good first day for the IEF 2007. The sun shone. The hotel was right on the beach. You could get sand under your toes in the coffee breaks.

Is the industry consolidating or de-consolidating? Recently I had a discussion on the topic with John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Apple could perform a notable double whammy this month by saving both the smartphone market and the solid state laptop market.

Is Wintel withering? First Dell, then Toshiba, erstwhile staunch Intel-ites, let in the alien hordes of AMD, then Dell goes back to selling PCs with an old OS after Microsoft Vista bombs.

Girlish hysterics which have seen analysts slash their forecast for the year, now turn out to have been just that, hysterics caused by false assumptions based on one quarter's figures

SEMI, the equipment people, have come up with encouraging industry news - that device manufacturers will only increase their capital spending on equipment by three per cent and their spending on fab construction by between four to five per cent this year.

Being a high-tech CEO, and being certain about anything, appear to be incompatible these days.

Unexpected mega-shifts are appearing in the industry which signalling a rearrangement in the balance of power in various markets.

Lawksa-mercy what a laugh, the rebounding price of memory might get all those semiconductor industry analysts having to put their forecasts up again.

The difficulties of forecasting the semiconductor industry have prompted analysts Future Horizons to resort to the application of chaos theory.

It’s been a pretty miserable Q2 for the chip sector. Although the semiconductor industry’s overall revenues declined sequentially by only 1 per cent in Q2 (after a 6 per cent decline in Q1), many companies have found profits elusive.

So here we are, two months into the second half of the year when things should get better. Poor results in the first half are traditionally spiced with the prediction that things will turn up in the second. As STMicroelectronics’ chief economist, Jean-Philippe Dauvin says: “I wish I could always live in the second half of the year.”

The Sharp-Pioneer tie-up, announced yesterday, and the purchase of Sanyo Semiconductor reported today, reflect a growing trend in Japan to look for amalgamations and restructurings in the technology industry. Another such deal, expected soon, is the merger of Sony Semiconductor with Toshiba.

It’s an interesting commentary on human nature to see the mix of affection and wariness in the attitude of Japan to Commodore Matthew Perry who sailed with four ships into Tokyo Bay on March 31st 1854 to the astonishment of the locals who had never seen steamships before.

Fresh from success in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), IBM is to spread its wings, and its market development dollars, across a new range of geographies: Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Vietnam, the Philippines, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Chile and Peru, according to an internal IBM memo quoted in the New York Times.

Freescale and Texas Instruments have been hit by cellphone woes, with TI facing a 3.4 per cent decline in revenues and said to be laying off 400 people in Dallas, and Freescale said to be facing a 10.7 per cent decline in 2007 chip sales primarily because of the weakness in the cellphone business of its main customer, Motorola.

The news from CES 2008 that Intel is to try its hand again at mobile telecoms and consumer chips leads one to ask the question: Can Intel succeed in markets where it doesn’t have a monopoly?

According to semiconductor industry folk-lore this should be a very good year for the chip industry.

Are Americans more gullible than the rest of the world? It seems that all the rumours that AMD and IBM will merge have come out of the US, while those who think the idea daft are non-Americans.

Someone calling himself Paul Otellini has responded somewhat unfavourably to a report carried by Barron’s that Goldman Sachs has taken Intel off its ‘Conviction Buy List’.

It must be hellish being a CEO these days. You can’t swan around bathed in glory when you’ve got stock market analysts snapping at your heels telling you they won’t recommend people to buy your shares unless you do what they say.