Yarns

Designer viruses may one day produce nano-scale logic speculated researchers at a Kavli Futures Symposium in 2011. “In my dreams, I can imagine some environmentally safe virus which, by design, manufactures and spits out a 64-bit adder,” said Donald Eiger, the scientist that spelled the letters IBM in xenon atoms in 1989. “We then just flow the virus’s effluent over ...

‘A tour d’horizon of the challenges facing the IC industry was delivered by Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkley Design Automation, to the 2011 Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz. ‘Subramanian started at the macro level, pointing out that where GDP is growing the fastest in the world, per capita income is low. “In the next three or four decades people ...

Back in 2011, as now, the world seemed a turbulent place and, as now, chips were getting the blame for it. ‘Worldwide political turbulence is being enabled by semiconductors, Dave Bell, CEO of Intersil, told the 2011 Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz. “The world is moving at a dizzying pace because of the power of interconnection,” said Bell, “the ...

20 years ago, as the industry transitioned from 0.13 micron to 90nm, the problem for everyone was leakage Leakage at the 90nm process node was not as big a problem for Philips Semiconductors as it was for other chip companies because Philips scaled for cost rather than performance, said its CTO Theo Claasen. “We can maintain the price erosion, but ...

16 years ago, Steve Cutler, Intel’s technical marketing manager, cane up with these ten predictions for the technology industry: Prediction One – new classes of portable devices with ten times more battery life Sub-threshold integrated circuit technology requires only 300mV to operate. Intel showed 4-way SIMD (single instruction multiple data) vector processing accelerator in 45nm in CMOS operated below its ...

15 years ago, our friend Mike Bryant, CTO of Future Horizons, gave a tour d’horizon of the future of semiconductor process technology at the IFS-MT2010 conference in London, First of all Bryant tackled the problems: “The cost of developing a process node is inversely proportional to the node length,” said Bryant, “so the cost of developing 22nm is twice that ...

“The age of point tools is over,” Aart de Geus, founder and CEO of Synopsys,  told Electronics Weekly in 2005, “We think we’re going to see a massive decrease in the importance of point tools.” De Geus said it took Synopsys two and a half years of “full focus effort” in 2004, 2003 and half of 2002 to get all ...

When Arm was just eight years old, its founding CEO, Sir Robin Saxby, said it would was becoming the world standard processor standard. “It’s the acceptance of the architecture – we’re becoming the global standard we expected to be,” ARM’s chairman, Saxby, told EW in 1998. In the first six months of that year, Arm’s licensees had shipped over 15 ...

In the days when a semiconductor company’s customers were expected to be grateful for whatever product a semi company threw over the wall, an industry executive, later to become a semiconductor CEO himself, tells this yarn: ”In the mid-eighties one of the very largest semi companies in the business decided that hearing the voice of the customer would be a ...

Intel has many challenges of which the most formidable may be the CEO’s pledge:  “We are going back to basics by listening to our customers.” Many will chuckle at this ambition – Intel has a less than exemplary record in customer care – possibly harking back to Andy Grove’s famous remark about dealing with non-compliant parts: “Ship the shit”. Mind ...