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.
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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 . . . . . .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Continue reading "The Ten Best Semiconductor Venture Capitalists." »
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.