Mannerisms

What are the ten best decisions ever made in the semiconductor industry's history? This is the stuff of which long evenings are made, but here, for what it's worth, is one list compiled after a long evening.

A reader says that one of the best decisions ever made in the chip business was the decision to put a complete computer core on an IC (Intel's 4004) and suggests expanding the list of The Ten Best Decisions Ever Made in the Semiconductor Industry http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semiconductor-blog/2007/03/ten-best-decisions-ever-made-i.html to the 15 Best Decisions Ever Made . . . . . .

This may not look like much but it took a lot more evenings to compile than the lists of ten best and ten worst decisions.

The list of ten best CEOs was a pretty easy list to compile. This list doesn't seem to me too debatable, but I may be proved wrong . . . . .

The ten most important breakthroughs in the semiconductor industry was an even more difficult decision than the ten best chips ever built and open to as much argument. But here are, anyway, ten of the most important breakthroughs in semiconductor technology.

Here are the ten best British chip companies.

These are the ten companies which have had the most effect on the evolution of semiconductor technology.

Here are the ten worst cock-ups in the history of the electronics industry. The UK has had its fair share of them, and two of them came from one UK company - GEC.

The electronics industry's ten best quotes span 150 years. They are as follows:

There are a lot of candidates for this list, but here are ten things that really deserved to have made it, and here they are:

The ten greatest survivors have outlived the rest of the semiconductor industry while retaining their original format.

The electronics industry's ten best quotes span 150 years. They are as follows:

This is a tricky one. These are not the ten best written or most entertaining books, or most authoritative or most insightful books on the industry, but each possesses one, or more, of those qualities. Some are by insiders, some by outsiders like academics and journalists.

Not an easy one. The chip industry has been built on the shoulders of many genius engineers, sung and unsung.

Thanks to Al Haun for suggesting this one, and for putting forward some of the names. Here they are, the ten best chip designers:

King of the Semiconductor Salesmen is, of course, Jerry Sanders, while Tom Bay, first head of sales at Fairchild Semiconductor, defined semiconductor marketing, and Bill Davidow, head of Operation Crush which won Intel the IBM PC design win, intellectualised semiconductor marketing practice in his book High Technology Marketing.

Here are the ten best ideas for founding a start-up semiconductor company.

These are not the ten richest venture capitalists, nor are they necessarily the ten who've generated the biggest returns, but they've had the best effect on growing the semiconductor industry.

For a product to be sexy:

1. You must want to get your hands on it, and it must feel good when you do;

2. It must have charm - intuitive use - ‘if I press this button I expect this to happen’, and it does!

The semiconductor industry has always required leaders, men who can bet the farm on a particular direction and have the company follow them. Some CEOs have done this by judgment, some by charisma and some by both. Here are the ten most charismatic:

Here are the ten greatest microprocessors ever built:

Some of these are product types made by various manufacturers, others were proprietary developments. Here are the ten best logic chips.

Very many thanks to Ian Dedic for the suggestions here. Below are the ten best analogue chips.

Four of these came from Intel: the first commercial MOS DRAM, the first EPROM, the first commercial EEPROM and MLC flash. The PROM had a major effect on the industry, hence the inclusion of the 5603 1K PROM. The other memopry chips had a profound effect on their markets at the time. The Mostek 16K DRAM, the Inmos 16K NMOS SRAM, the NEC 256K DRAM, the Toshiba 1Mbit DRAM set the standards for those product areas, and dominated their markets. So here are the ten best memory chips:

Recent years have seen a proliferation of excellent new wireless standards. It wasn't always like this: Remember CT2? The ghastly Rabbit wireless standard backed by Ferranti? Now we have loads of good wireless standards. My thanks to Richard Wilson for suggestions for this one. The ten best wireless standards are:

This is pretty easy because the analyst company VLSI Research provides a list based on revenues every year and, every year, it’s pretty much the same as the previous year.

This list comes from Future Horizons whose International System and SOC Conference started in Prague today. Here ‘Best’ means ‘Biggest’. I have to say I can’t think of anyone who makes much money out of chips for PCs and Servers, except Intel, and I find the No.10 slot, for USB sticks, just amazing. What on earth do people use all those memory sticks for?

Thanks to Rupert Goodwins for this one. A fascniating list with explanations from Rupert of why he chose them.

This is a pretty obvious one, they're the world's biggest electronics OEMs, not counting IBM. The top ten buy more chips than anyone else in the world, and collectively account for about a third of all the world's chip sales measured by value.

Here, is a list of the top ten chipless companies measured by the value of sales. ARM is twice the size of second-placed Rambus.

Over the chip industry's history there have been an increasing number of R&D collaborations as the cost of developing the technology has become increasingly expensive. The ten most effective examples of these have been:

There have been many famous female scientists, but surprisingly few in the fields of computing and communications. Here are the ten most famous:

From Faraday's 1833 discovery that increasing heat can increase conductivity in silver sulphide, the reverse of the normal effect of heat on conductors, to Bell Labs' 1947 invention of the transistor, were a series of all-important discoveries which made the transistor possible. Interestingly, six of the ten discoveries were made in the 19th century.

There's never been anyone like Edison with his 1,093 patents and his 'Invention Factory' in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he boasted he would invent something minor every ten days and a 'Big Trick' every six months. Here are Edison's ten best Big Tricks:

Sometime this year, the number of active mobile phones in the world will reach three billion out of a world population of six and a half billion people.The wireless industry has been built on a series of key steps of which the first took place in London, one year after the death of George IV.

These are not the CEOs of the ten best performing semiconductor companies of 2007, but they are the ten who did most for the future of their companies.

Thanks to iSuppli for this one. Here are the companies in the Top 20 of the iSuppli league table which grew fastest last year.

Thanks to Future Horizons, Europe's leading chip industry analyst company, for this one. These are expected to be the fastest growing markets for chips between 2007 and 2012.

Thanks to Computing in Science and Engineering for this one. Here are the ten best algorithms:

This is a bit of a no-brainer because, except in the case of phase-change and MRAM which are included because of their promise, the others are chosen strictly on their pulling power in terms of dollars. Here they are, the ten best memory chips:

OLEDs have not turned out to be the storming replacement to TFT they were once cracked up to be with a market hovering around the billion dollar mark. Here are the ten best manufacturers:

Here they are: the ten best EDA companies in an industry which, apart from the top four, remains fragmented.

Pretty subjective stuff this but, I reckon, these are the ten best mobile phones ever built.

Thanks to VLSI Research for this one. Here are the top ten, measured by revenue, semiconductor production equipment manufacturing companies in the world.

Thanks to the FT for this one. The ten biggest US high-tech spenders on R&D, measured in billions of US dollars, are:

My thanks to Dr Dwight Decker, chairman of Conexant and the Global Semiconductor Alliance for this one. Here are the ten best reasons not to be engaged in the semiconductor industry:

In an era when the semiconductor industry is forming more alliances than at any time in its history, many of which are international alliances, it is salutary to turn to one of Japan's great CEOs, Tsuyoshi Kwanishi, formerly CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, who set out in his book, Chip Management, ten rules for forming alliances.

Kawanishi formed notable international alliances in his time at Toshiba - e.g. with Siemens Semiconductor, later extended to Siemens, IBM and Motorola. His ten rules are:

Thanks to VLSI Research for this one; the ten largest suppliers of critical sub-systems to the chip, flat panel and data storage manufacturers showing the emergence of photovoltaic suppliers as a "key opportunity for sub-systems suppliers," according to VLSI's John West.. Some chip manufacturing equipment OEMs derive 25 per cent of their revenues from photovoltaics.

Thanks to a combination of STMicroelectronics and iSuppli for this one which takes account of the new look to the market since ST and NXP pooled their wireless chip operations into a $3 billion revenue joint venture taking the No.3 slot in the wireless industry's rankings. That deal is expected to close in Q308. Assuming it does, here, with their market shares of the total market, are the wireless chip company rankings:

According to rumours in the German press  Infineon's CEO Wolfgang Ziebart will be ousted by Saturday, KKR is to take a 40-50 per cent stake in Infineon, and NXP will be sold to Infineon.

 Thanks to Future Horizons for this one: the ten basic rules for succeeding in the chip industry. Here they are:

The hi-tec world is full of contests between companies, standards, technologies, etc. Here are the ten best contests currently excercising the hi-tec scene:

Where are the semiconductor-savvy bosses? This was the recent question of  Malcolm Penn, CEO of leading analysts Future Horizons. With more and more companies run by finance-driven executives, here are the ten most semiconductor-savvy bosses. Some are no longer CEOs, but all are active in the industry.

Thanks to the Sunday Times for this list which was compiled by Professor John Quelch, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. According to Quelch the ten signs that the CEO's going off the rails are when:

Thanks to DisplaySearch for this one. The ten biggest apps in terms of $s for OLEDs over the next eighteen months are:

Thanks to Sharp for this one. The ten best target markets for E-Signage are:

Well, here they are, the top ten items on the semiconductor industry's wish-list:

Thanks to IC Insights for this one which came out last month.

Here, according to the Global Semiconductor Alliance (the old Fabless Semiconductor Association) are the top ten fabless semiconductor companies measured by  Q2 revenues:

This is based on companies' longevity in the top ten rankings. You might dispute RCA's place but it was one of only four companies (the other three being TI, Motorola and GE) which made the transition from being a top ten discrete transistor supplier to becoming a top ten IC supplier. RCA was a top tenner for over 20 years and was also, of course, the great pioneer of CMOS.

If you get one of these I don't think you'll complain. If you're still looking for presents- here are some ideas. If you're looking to treat yourself in the New Year Sales - go for it.

Looking at this I realise 2008 was not exactly a stunning year for the industry. But at least the chip business held up when other businesses, like finance and car-making, fell down. Let's hope 2009 produces better things. The ten best things about 2008 were:

Here are the ten best inventions of all time:

Here are the ten best electricity-based inventions:

Eugene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner and Perkins which evolved into the tech industry's most famous venture capital company, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, was good at propounding Laws. Kleiner generated many of these Laws which have passed into industry folk-lore, and which now form the set-in-stone tenets for today's VCs all over the world.  These are the ten best:

Thanks to IFI Patent Intelligence [http://www.ificlaims.com/] 2008 for this one. The ten companies which earned the most US Patents in 2008 were:

Thanks to Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, for this one. In his book Chip Management he quotes these ten rules about forecasting.

Thanks to The Independent for this one - the ten companies which have destroyed most value in the acquiring company's share price. The most destructive deal of all-time was, reckons The Indie, RBS' takeover of ABN-Amro. Apparently only 35 per cent of M&A deals lead to an increase in the value of the acquiring company's shares

Thanks to Future Horizons for this one. The ten fastest apps for semiconductors last year were:

Thanks to Future Horizons for this. The ten biggest semiconductor applications in 2008 were:

Thanks to Future Horizons for this one. From a PC & Server market worth $85 billion in 2013, to a mobile phone market worth $60.7 billion in 2013 down to a Digital Audio Player market which will be worth just over $4 billion (and dropping), these will be  the top ten semiconductor applications in four years' time.

Six of  ten had been in the top ten rankings of manufacturers of vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) they were: GE, Westinghouse, Western Electric, RCA,  Sylvania and Philco  - all six successfully making the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors. The earliest companies to get into transistor manufacturing which had never been in the vacuum tube manufacturing business were TI, Motorola, Transitron, Hughes, Clevite and Germanium Products (which set up solely to make transistors for hearing aids). So the 1955 Semiconductor Top Ten were:

By 1965 TI had started its 25 year-long reign as the world's No.1 semiconductor company, a record which is unlikely ever to be matched. The Semiconductor Top Ten for 1965 were:

By 1975, those who had mastered MOS early were in the fore. TI still reigned over the industry.  Philips, having bought Signetics in 1975, had shot up the rankings, and NEC had become the first Japanese company to enter the ranks of the top ten - a harbinger of a new semiconductor world order.

By 1985, Japanese semiconductor world market leadership had lasted for five years but the Americans were not ready to roll over. In 1987 Charlie Sporck and Bob Noyce put together the Sematech consortium and, in 1992 the US had 44 per cent world market share, the Japanese had 43 per cent - the first time for 12 years that the US had led.

By now Intel, on the back of its commanding position in PC microprocessors was way out in front of the rest of the industry. The first Korean company, Samsung, had entered the ranks of the top ten and IBM made one of its brief appearances in the rankings.

The high-water mark of European participation in the semiconductor industry with three European companies in the top ten. The European success derived from its expertise in SOC, helped by pan-European R&D programmes like MEDEA, which emhasised the development of  platforms.

Well you can argue till the cows come home about this, and whether you're in the back of the pub, or sitting outside some Continental taverna, here's the basis for a bloody good argument. The ten best techie films are (or aren't):

Thanks to our sister paper Computer Weekly for this one, though apologies for the 10th slot - modesty is not their forte. Here are the ten best twitterers:

Alexander Graham Bell received numerous awards and honours in his lifetime. Of the many, these seem to be about the ten best:

Thanks to IC Insights for this one - the top ten semiconductor companies for 2008. Here they are:

Thanks to Yole Developpement for this one. Here are the ten biggest MEMS suppliers in 2008: