Electro-ramblings

IT website ZDNet has undergone a complete redesign, launching this morning with a radical makeover of its pages.

After launching a huge suite of blogs during the last two years - which led to huge increases in traffic - ZDNet has now gone the whole hog with Web 2.0.

The site include loads of social networking features and nice features like a tag cloud showing the most popular keywords being written about and accessed.

News on the home page has tabbed browsing, so you can look at the latest stories, but also filter by most discussed, most popular and those highlighted by the editors.

An interview with Matt Loney, the site director, on Liberate Media shows just how far the firm has moved away from the traditional publishing paradigms.

"We've put a lot of thought into search with our redesign, because in addition to encouraging user generated content, we want to give readers a way to discover each other based on the content they and their peers are creating as much as on who knows whom."

This is probably the first example of a publisher, originally from the print world, totally embracing Web 2.0. Let's hope it's not the last.

Two or three years ago, the process technology race between Altera and Xilinx was neck and neck - it was difficult to split the two programmable logic firms.

But Xilinx execs will be feeling fairly pleased with themselves this week, as Altera admits it won't have 65 nanometre samples until Q3 2007.

That is staggering, when you consider that Xilinx started shipping 65nm samples, albeit in small doses, in May of this year.

When Xilinx launched samples of Virtex-5, the company said its lead on process technology was “Six, maybe nine months.”

So why has the process technology gap - which didn't exist a couple of years ago - grown to more than a year?

One reason for this gap is the different approaches of the two companies' foundries. Xilinx's foundry UMC worked on a standard process at 65nm - exactly what Xilinx needs. And even if UMC hadn't come up with the goods Xilinx is also fabbing the devices at second source Toshiba, and could have used its second source fab at IBM.

However, Altera's foundry TSMC has gone for a low power process for its first stab at 65nm - which is not strictly suited to FPGAs. Altera has had to wait for TSMC to get round to doing the necessary higher power process, as it doesn't have a second source.

There's a good article on the subject of 65nm at Embedded.com - 65nm: Where are the chips?

Update: Canadian reverse engineering firm Chipworks has just released a breakdown of the Virtex-5, comparing devices from Toshiba and UMC.

We've been waiting all year, and the main event has finally arrived - Electronica!

Fantastic - a week of pork knuckle, saurkraut and German lager - brilliant. The electronics industry doesn't get much better than this.

David Manners and I will be blogging direct from the event (assuming the technology works - and if it doesn't there'll be several hundred people within shouting distance who I can directly blame for its failure).

I've got a packed programme of events, visiting the stands of companies such as Altium, Imperas, Kontron, QNX, Actel, Analog Devices, International Rectifier, Chipworks, IDT, Texas Instruments, Schurter, Maxwell, and Vicor.

Several other journalists from Electronics Weekly and the Reed Electronics Group will be reporting from the show, and you can catch the latest news on our Electronica mini-site.

So technology willing, and if my liver survives the TKO party tonight, come back tomorrow for live updates from the show.

The electronics industry is very much alive and kicking, if the atmosphere at Electronica is anything to go by.

Today I've been to see Altium, Kontron, QNX, Actel and Analog Devices. All reckon its a good show, and it's still the first day.

Attendees are here in Munich in good numbers, and they're all smiling. The lager helps.

XJTAG's booth is packed, which I'm sure is due to the technology, and not the three scantily clad girls giving out free-bees.

Hall A6 is a bit racy as well, with a German circuit board maker doing body painting of topless models. It's quite funny watching loads of guys wandering past, heads pointing in one direction eyes in another. Some of them for the third or fourth time. Of course, I was only hanging around for research purposes.

Last night at Electronica we had the Industry Awards event. It's the second time we've held the event in Munich, and it went down really well.

Comedian Dominic Holland was the presenter for the night, and he did a good job of taking the piss out of the whole industry. Apparently we're all a bunch of nerds. Quite right too.

My blogging colleague David Manners still hasn't seen the naked woman in Hall A6. The problem is, it doesn't matter who has seen her, not one single person can remember the name of the company.

One of the biggest talking points among journalists at electronica last week was the no-show at the CEO panel by Carlo Bozzoti, the boss of STMicroelectronics. For one of Europe's top three CEOs not to turn up at the annual panel of the industry's biggest trade event is a "big thing".

As my collegue David Manners pointed out: "What on Earth could be more important than the annual CEO panel."

In fact, the behaviour of all the top bods at Electronica has our friends over at EETimes seething. Brian Fuller's opinion column CEOs say 'see ya' to Electronica panel, lists a catalogue of bad form from the industry glitterati.

In particular, Fuller bemoans the "no questions" format of the CEO panel:

This CEO group is eloquent when it wants to be. If it was they who made a no-questions panel a condition of their participation, then we've entered a sad, dark world.

He's right. For a panel session not to be moderated by someone who can field questions from the audience, whether from engineers or from journalists, is pathetic. Whoever made the decision to ban questions should take a long hard look at the message they're sending out to the industry.

As Brian rather eloquently puts it:

There was a time when electronics was roaring and CEOs energetically engaged in public discourse about where things were headed and the numerous possibilities that awaited technology creators who shared ideas. Perhaps they've lost the vision, the courage of their convictions.

Last week's Elektra awards have been You Tube'd by an enterprising PR man working for TSMC, the Taiwanese foundry.

Andrew Shephard from UK PR firm EML took this video of TSMC's Dieter Stroehle going on stage to accept the award for Manufacturer of the Year.

The awards were held on board a yacht in Munich harbour and you can clearly see there was a force ten blowing that night. That or Andrew really needs a steadier hand.

More details of the award winners can be found on the Electronics Weekly main site.

Electronics purists look away now, because this is going to hurt. The University of Bath is about to offer a Masters degree course that combines mechanical and electronic engineering.

According to Professor Alan Bramley from the University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering:

The concept is to bind the two disciplines together as soon as possible in the degree. Teaching engineering as a whole to students is something that is done on the continent, but not here in Britain – here they are either taught the different areas of engineering completely separately or, where there are joint courses, these just mix modules from the various engineering degrees.

In many ways it makes sense. One of the problems with doing a pure electronics degree is that it leaves the graduate totally at sea when joining in a modern engineering firm. If you want to design microprocessor systems then a degree that combines electronics and computing would seem to be in order. (I can highly recommend University College London's course.)

On the other hand, if you want to be a systems engineer, then Bath's mix of mechanical and electronic would provide a much better foundation, as knowledge of mechanics and materials will be essential at some stage in your career.

The Royal Academy of Engineering has already said that more integrated teaching is essential:

The reality of today’s workplace is that employers (particularly the larger ones) expect graduates to join multi-functional teams engaged in the development of complex system projects, for which graduates of traditional mono-discipline degree courses might feel ill prepared.

UCL recently added electronics with nanotechnology, and electronics with biochemistry would seem a logical combination. I expect we'll see more of this blurring of the traditional subject boundaries, and a good thing it is too.

John Cooley has this great post on his Wiretap page on Deepchip about the chief exec of Aprio, Mike Gianfagna (pictured left), who seems to have done the honourable thing and laid himself off.

Cooley quotes EETimes' Richard Goering, and adds:

And I must cite Gianfagna's honor as a leader for laying himself off during these bad times -- a lot of CEOs would cut anyone but themselves in a time of corporate crisis.

Aprio is an electronic design automation start-up in the design for manufacturing sector, and Cooley describes the troubles in this area as the "DFM Deathwatch".

Yes, DFM got a LOT of hype at the recent DAC, but the reality is that means we're in the Death Watch for the bulk of these DFM start-ups. It's exactly like watching the Titanic sinking.

The big four EDA firms - Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor and Magma - are likely to end up with one technology each, leaving it would seem, space for just a couple of independents.

In ESNUG 453 we listed 27 companies as passengers doing DFM, 21 of which were start-ups. That's waaaaaay too many companies to keep afloat in this niche; now it's just a question of how are they going to die. I see 5 to 7 lifeboats when the fog clears.

Eek!

According to my colleagues at PersonnelToday.com, a third of graduates believe they chose the wrong degree.

One in five employees who graduated in 2005 said they should have chosen a more business-based course or a professional qualification, the study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) showed.

Now I don't know about you, but I thought that I'd picked the wrong course about 24 hours after turning up at my halls of residence at the tender age of 18.

This highly critical analysis was based purely on the fact that electronics undergrads had to attend over 20 hours of lectures per week plus practicals, lab work and assignments.

Contrast this with my new-found drinking buddies:

• English - eight to ten hours in the lecture halls plus some reading - nice.
  
• Nordic Studies - that'll be five hours a week plus a bit of reading (optional), and you have to go skiing at Christmas - cushy.
  
• Media Studies - politeness prevents me from commenting on this choice of study.
  

Some 20 years later my feelings have changed somewhat, in that I'm gainfully employed (no, really, honest - publishing does count) and I can look a person in the eye when asked what degree I took.

So to all those fresh graduates who think they've chosen badly - wait a few years, and see what life brings.

One of the most read stories on the Financial Times website is Plastic may spell the end of the silicon microchip.

The article expands on the news this week that Plastic Logic, the Cambridge University spin-off, has won $100m in equity funding to build an e-book display factory in Germany.

It's brilliant news for Plastic Logic, and may herald the arrival of the technological basis for the next 'killer app' in the form of a lightweight, low power flexible display.

But according to the FT story, developments at Plastic Logic are:

holding out the possibility that before long the electronic characteristics of the company’s plastic devices might not be too different from those of conventional silicon chips

I'm sure the silicon manufacturers are quaking in their boots. Or maybe they aren't. It'll be a long, long time before plastic substrates can match silicon.

Even the much vaunted end to Moore's Law keeps getting put back a few years at a time, pushing back the time when plastic might take over.

So expect circuits on plastic substrates to have niche applications in the next couple of decades, but don't over-hype the technology.

In his blog on EDN's website, Michael Santarini is asking for help figuring out the vapour-ware from the real world when it comes to FPGA silicon.

As we move into 2007, I’d like to ask for your help. One of the biggest issues I face in covering the FPGA industry is being able to tell who really has working silicon and who doesn’t; which products work well in the field and which products don’t.

Mike was putting together EDN's top 100 hot products of 2006, and faced some problems over whether to include certain devices or not. Altera's Stratix III FPGAs, for example, were included, even though there is no silicon until later this year, while a Xilinx part was also included, but with no third party reports of silicon.

I elected both products largely on a leap of faith.

The programmable logic industry, and others like EDA, goes through phases when it comes to product releases. A few years ago the FPGA companies were pretty good: only making announcements when they had silicon, even if it was only engineering samples. Nowadays it seems the style is to announce a year ahead of silicon.

So please help Mike by telling him about silicon you have seen and used.

My blogging colleague David Manners has written a brilliant blog on the subject of chip firms getting out of basic process development.

In NXP, TI, STMicro and the end of process development, David points out that ending fundamental process development puts semiconductor companies firmly into the hands of foundries.

This might not seem such a bad thing, but in the long term will leave the big chip firms very exposed:

Will prices go up? Will terms get harsher? You bet they will. What looks like a saving in overhead today for the big companies could come back and hit them between the eyes in higher prices tomorrow.

It's not as if it actually costs very much to do some basic R&D, with Texas Instruments saying it will save the firm about $150m a year. For firms such as NXP, ST and TI, says David:

For a small contribution to the bottom line in 2008, they are prepared to sacrifice their long-term independence.

One of the problems with reporting financial performance of companies is that it's really easy to end up with a completely different slant to other reports.

Today is no exception, with Microsoft's figures coming under scrutiny.

Here's how The Inquirer put it at Microsoft's profits plummet:

[Microsoft's] focus on its new operating system Vista has seriously damaged its last quarter profits. Microsoft saw a 28 per cent drop in earnings over the last few months, despite revenue growth that exceeded forecasts. Earnings fell to $2.63 billion from $3.65 billion during the same period last year. Wall Street bean counters were pleased that Vole's Revenue rose to $12.5 billion, but shareholders were not and the price of a share in Vole dropped 64 cents.

As opposed to Silicon.com's angle at Lack of Vista not felt on Gates' bottom-line:

With holiday PC sales apparently unscathed by the lack of Windows Vista, Microsoft reported quarterly profits that topped expectations and its own forecast. The software giant said it earned $2.63bn, or 26 cents per share, on revenue of $12.54bn for the three months ended 31 December, its second fiscal quarter. That compares with profits of $3.65bn, or 34 cents per share, on revenue of $11.83bn for the same quarter a year ago.

And for a third view, here's the Register at Microsoft pulls in record Q2:

Microsoft drummed up record revenues in the December quarter - its fiscal Q2 - and could have done even better if it hadn't squirreled away some of its sales to 'recognize' in Q3. The company today announced Q2 revenues of $12.54bn, six per cent up on last year, and net income of $2.63bn - a 28 per cent drop. But it deferred $1.64bn to account for Vista and Office upgrade coupons given to PC makers to dish out to their customers, which are expected to be redeemed in Q3. Without this set aside, revenues would have been 14 per cent higher than last time.

So which is correct? Well they all are, but it goes to show how readers need to understand the background, politics and tone taken by each individual website, just like we have always done with newspapers.

So far this year we've seen two plastic semiconductor firms decide on their route to manufacturing.

What's bizarre is the choice of location for those manufacturing plants. The UK firm - Plastic Logic - has chosen to go to Germany, while the Dutch - Polymer Vision - are coming to the UK.

In the current socio-economic climate of "British is best", why did Plastic Logic feel the need to go to Dresden?

According to Steve Bush at EW (Philips plastic display spin-off uses UK fab) a failure of the DTI is to blame.

Dutch flexible display firm Polymer Vision has chosen the UK for its first manufacturing fab, aiming to be in production this year. This constrasts with the recent decision of Cambridge-based flexible display firm Plastic Logic to choose Dresden rather than a site in the UK for its $100m production facility which uses similar technologies. DTI funding failure loses UK Plastic Logic fab

Bushy's story suggests that a UK facility would have the capacity to cope with Plastic Logic's manufacturing requirements.

According to Polymer Vision chief operating officer, Guido Aelbers, Southampton-based manufacturer Innos has the capability of scaling up the technology to a level that can be used to ship volumes to customers.

Few stories have a ten year lifespan in the electronics industry, and Scotland's flirtation with Alba makes the grade, but alas the dream seems to have died.

The story started late in 1997, as Scottish Enterprise and Cadence announced they would attract nearly 2,000 jobs to Livingston with Chip design centre Alba may put Scotland on top of world.

Shortly afterwards in March of 1998, the plan was extended as a second major chip firm was said to have joined up, taking the proposed number of jobs to between 3,000 and 4,000.

Groundbreaking took place in May 1998 as this imaginatively titled story tells: Alba seeing you and in June of the same year the Scottish inward investment boss moved to Cadence.

The fabled "second firm" never really materialised, but Micro Linear followed Cadence to Scotland with the promise of 50 jobs. Not quite the thousand or so promised.

It was in the summer of 2000 that the problems began, as Cadence said it would scale back its Scottish jobs target, to 1,000 engineers by 2004.

Then a boost: Alba Centre attracts Motorola to Scotland came in September 2000, with 550 jobs by 2005.

At about the same time, Scottish Enterprise announced a £40m expansion at Alba, as it spun the centre out in a sort of public /private partnership.

In 2001 the crash in electronics was obvious, and a Scottish bio-tech firm said it would create 500 design jobs at Alba.

Summer 2002 saw Plexus joining Alba in Scotland and similar little events occurred for a couple of years before the focus shifted more to start-up firms.

By October of last year the emphasis has shifted completely: Scottish technology centre supports start-ups

If you look past the hype of the jobs, the bit of Alba that looked interesting right from the start was the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI). And the ISLI is still proving itself to be a winner.

PR company Napier has been discussing our blogs on its site. In Electronics Weekly to extend blogs, Mike Maynard makes the point that the blogs provide something quite different than traditional news from journalists:

The blogs provide the opportunity for opinion and comment: something that is rarely provided by journalists in our industry... In electronics, editors perform a different function: firstly they provide an intelligent filter for the information and secondly they aggregate information and opinions about particular topics in a very efficient way.

Mike is pre-empting the launch of a handful of blogs on the site, each covering a different sector of the industry, and each written by an expert in that field. This is a crucial point for us: our blogs aim to give readers analysis and information they couldn't ordinarily get hold of.

Our first guru blogger was Gary Nevison of Farnell, arguably the UK's number one expert on legislation, who is writing Directive Decoder, which looks at issues such as WEEE and RoHS.

We'll soon be launching blogs on parallel processing, test and measurement, mil/aero and high reliability, IP and silicon-on-insulator.

Back at Napier, Mike reckons it would be good to get someone of the calibre of Bob Pease to write a blog:

Perhaps the new blogs on Electronics Weekly will produce a contributor of the calibre of Bob Pease, whose articles for Electronic Design on subjects from Floobydust to PLLs are required reading for almost every engineer at some point in their careers... if EW could find another writer like Bob, I'd read the blog every week!

What - you mean you don't read our blogs everyday Mike?

My blogging colleague Gary Nevison has posted a very interesting piece on the EuP (Energy using Products) Directive.

As a Yorkshireman he obviously calls it the 'eh up' Directive.

The Directive does not apply to means of transport (aircraft, cars etc.) but, apart from this, the scope is deliberately broad, covering, in principle, any product which when in use depends on, generates, transfers or measures energy (electricity, fossil fuel or renewable)

EuP is going to be a critical one for the electronics industry, as its scope is potentially broader than RoHS or WEEE, explains Gary:

There will also be a growing demand for more comprehensive data on energy use, composition and compatibility of materials, weight, disassembley, recyclability, identification and in some cases a move towards modular designs which can be upgraded more easily

Gary is writing a whole series of blog posts introducing various flavours of legislation that are affecting, or will affect, the electronics industry, including the ATEX Directive on equipment used in explosive atmospheres, the REACH chemicals legislation, and China's version of RoHS.

First reaction to the news was positive - good to see Intel finally burying its differences with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project and throwing its weight behind the venture, but what took it so long?

Reluctance to join an intitiative that had the involvement of AMD may be one factor, but the wider issues of helping the devloping world should have overcome this. As recently as Comdex 2007, last month, Intel was promoting its rival Classmate project, so it's a big turnaround.

We seem to be moving towards the business-end of the European Intel anti-trust case.

Have written about Sharp and its plans for a huge "Manufacturing Complex for the 21st Century", for producing LCD panels, using 10th-gen glass substrates: Sharp builds for 10th-generation glass substrates

In the wake of the Atmel's disposal of its North Tyneside fab, we review the plant's chequered history.

It's time for that periodic question: what is the state of the Browser Wars? How does Firefox compare to Internet Explorer when it comes to readers of ElectronicsWeekly.com? How is the battle faring on our particular piece of electronics turf?

Just FYI, stats for the last month are:

Yesterday I went to an interesting AMD briefing but I can't reveal its content, for a while, because all the journalists present had to sign a non disclosure agreement (NDA)...

Just been posting an entry into our Products section - the Anritsu MF2400C microwave frequency counter, as it happens.

"A full HD resolution and its static contrast of 1200:1 also ensure brilliant image reproduction from all sides," writes Sharp. "As thanks to Sharp's own in-house developed Advanced Super View (ASV) technology, these 108-inch displays offer an extremely wide viewing angle of 176° in all directions.