Mannerisms

The turnstiles at Electronica, of which there are many, have the annoying habit of prodding your backside as you go through as if to say: 'On your way, sunshine'.

It's silly to get paranoid about an inanimate object but one can still get prickly thinking about the schadenfreude of the designer as he built this in.

Now, on Electronica's second day, I have devised a way of avoiding this boot up the bum by performing a forward pelvic thrust as I insert my access card into the turnstiles reader.

Now I'm paranoid about looking rather silly as I go through the turnstiles but I feel it's a small victory.

The other depressing thing about today is that I still haven't seen the 'naked woman of HalleA6'.
Everyone on the train home was talking about her. She's reputed to be a barmaid from the Hofbrauhaus which means she won't be a fragile little thing. An ST exec told me she was on the GreenHills stand but she wasn't when I (very surreptitiously) looked

It has often occurred to me that the people who design electronic consumer goods must be players of electronics games.

When you buy any electronics product, the excitement of unwrapping it is almost immediately followed by the heart-sinking realisation of what you need to do to get it to work.

This is the doing of the gamers. When they’re gaming they’re used to overcoming problems, seeing their way around riddles and mysteries, solving conundrums and finding clues as they progress along in their game.

So when it comes to designing electronics goods the gamers adopt the same mentality.

If you, the purchaser, can surmount all the tests and trials the designer puts in front of you, if you can correctly understand and interpret the obscurely worded instructions and correctly act upon them, if you religiously and precisely follow the interminable rigmarole of steps you’re obliged to follow then, Hey Presto, you’re actually allowed to use the product you’ve handed over your hard-earned wonga to buy.

Royal openings are common in the microelectronics business, so a royal opening of the MEDEA+ annual forum covering the year’s achievements in pan-European microelectronics research, was no surprise.

The royal in question was His Serene Highness Prince Albert of Monaco, and a touch of serenity is exactly what the industry needs at the moment what with talk of over-capacity, over-inventory and slipping demand.

HSH is following a noble European tradition of royal openings. Queen Elizabeth II opened no less than three fabs, those of NEC, Fujitsu and Siemens. Not that it did those three companies much good, none of them own the fabs now.

The King and Queen of Spain opened AT&T’s fab outside Madrid some years ago, before AT&T exited from the microelectronics business. The Prince of Orange opened a Philips fab which is still going under Philips ownership – clearly an exception to the ill-omened royal opening norm.

Where a royal can’t do the biz, a President or Prime Minster can do quite well. Prime Minister John Major of the UK presided over two microelectronics openings, NEC’s second fab at Livingston and the ground-breaking of LG’s proposed fab in Wales. The first closed, the second was never built.

Clearly Prime Ministers have no better a record in opening fabs than Royals.

President Jacques Chirac of France opened Crolles Fab 2 and, since then, two of the three Crolles partners, Philips and Freescale, have been taken over by private equity funds.

Maybe it would be better to get a performing seal.

There was an informative little Q&A exchange at the MEDEA+ Forum last week.

Dr Ulrich Schaefer of Bosch was asked why the car manufacturers didn’t make upgradeable electronics like the PC makers do.

“You have to change the car to get upgraded electronics’ complained the questioner.

Schaefer replied: “I would not like to answer this question. It concerns our customers”.

By ‘customers’ I don’t think Schaefer meant you and I.

In a peripatetic industry it would be interesting to add up the number of hours spent in hotel rooms trying to figure out how things work.

Janet Kornblum, a columnist on USA Today, flips the concept of the ‘tech-nos’. People who say they’re not going to have any truck with high-tech gadgetry.

Further to the warnings of Mentor's Dr Wally Rhines, and others, of the growing power of the foundries and the IP companies comes new evidence that the foundries might be looking to gobble up both slices of the cake - manufacturing and design.

I notice that Intel has adopted the habit of putting at the bottom of every press announcement the words: 'Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation'.

It’s been lovely reading the coverage about the electricity cuts at the Samsung memory plant at Kiheung because every single report has been sympathetic to Samsung and thoroughly concerned about the effect on its business. It was not always like this.

According to a venerable English adage, Hungarians are the only people who can go into a revolving door behind you, and come out of it in front of you.

Dear old Bozotti. Like a gramophone record which has got stuck, the boss of STMicroelectronics has blamed the dollar for poor results for the third quarter in a row.