Mannerisms

A punchy piece in EETimes regrets the lack of Q&A at the Electronica CEO Forum. This could well be because of the current insecurities of the CEOs of NXP and Freescale. It seems that Freescale’s CEO has not even got a contract from the new owners. NXP’s CEO didn’t have an agreement settled with the new owners at the time ...

I have to say I love the sound of Xg Technology whose shares started trading in London today. Xg boasts an outrageously ambitious technology with the potential to wipe out the established wireless telecommunications industry and provide free, or almost free, telephony for everyone. It’s like the promise of the PC to ‘democratise the computer industry’. And the PC did ...

Stock Options Rule number one on meeting CEOs and the like: the greater the gravitas, the dodgier the business practices. Remember the remark: “The more he talked of his principles, the faster I counted the teaspoons.” Before we’ve got bored with CEOs moaning about how unfair Sarbanes-Oxley is to them, we find they’ve been fiddling the dates of their stock ...

People at Electronica reacted warmly to the fears about the private equity funds expressed by Xilinx CEO Wim Roelandts who dubbed them get-rich-quick schemes for a few individuals at the expense of companies’ long-term strategies. “Wim’s saying what everyone else is thinking”, is a typical response. The takeover of NXP and Freescale by these funds has sent ripples of fear ...

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 ...

One CEO who won’t be entertaining the private equity guys is Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx. After private equity companies bought both NXP and Freescale in deals worth $11bn and $17bn respectively, it seems that the semiconductor industry has become a target of these people. But Roelandts will be strongly resisting that fate for Xilinx. “Private equity buy-outs are a ...

If you see a ruddy-faced Bavarian going into a business meeting at 10 am with a massive glass of cloudy yellow beer in his hands, then you know it’s Electronica. So many of Europe’s trade shows have declined or died, but Electronica has stayed huge. “I don’t know if much business gets done there”, says an executive who has been ...

Against all the odds, a rash of new FPGA start-ups have appeared, among them Achronix, C-Switch, MathStar and Velogix. Why is it against the odds? Four reasons: The 25 year-old FPGA market is seen as settled into a two-horse affair with Altera and Xilinx owning over 80 per cent of the market and their much smaller rivals Actel, Lattice and ...

Potholes are high on the priority-list for Silicon Valley executives now that the revenues are beginning to flow again, jobs are less insecure and bonuses are creeping up. Being driven through Silicon Valley in a Porsche last month, I was surprised to hear the driver, a senior executive at one of the Valley’s most profitable companies, continually complaining about the ...

In the Wild West days of the semiconductor industry, you’d get fifteen manufacturers investing in enough capacity to each achieve fifteen per cent market share in a particular product area, and think nothing of it. If, they argued, the resultant over-capacity resulted in driving down prices, then that would work to expand the market. The thinking was that, as prices ...

Intel’s diversification into NAND flash is going to be interesting. It says it’s bringing up its first part, a 4Gbit memory, in three different 300mm fabs and is currently outputting samples. That sounds like a triple-risk, triple-expensive sledgehammer to crack a nut. Intel says it will add a new fab every year for NAND, which seems excessive when Samsung, Sandisk/Toshiba ...

Paranoia corner Has anyone else come across the phenomenon that, where there’s a paid WiFi connection, the free connections don’t work? Going through San Jose airport in October, there were about half a dozen network providers, one of which was free. I connected to all the others in turn but was unable to get onto the Web. Connect up to ...

Convergence is a lovely idea for the chip industry but a poor idea for consumers. The two best-selling products of the last few years have been the Blackberry and the iPod, both, effectively, single-purpose devices. One a mobile email terminal; the other a mobile music player. Both flying in the face of the contemporary mantra of convergence. For the chip ...

Seeing the other guy screw up is always a pleasure so it was good last week to see the truly awful state of the US wireless telephone network in Arizona. Whether you got to finish your call was problematical. Much of the time there was no coverage at all. The networks are grim in Europe. In Arizona they’re 3X grimmer. ...

Sir Robin Saxby’s Corona ballad, trailed back in October, is now released and can be enjoyed below. For those wishing to join in, the lyrics are added below the audio file. In a difficult time for everyone, especially those most affected by the virus, this is a special big thank you to the health professionals. Lyrics Analogue or Digital Feeling ...