How Sharp Got Toshiba Into CMOS
In 1970 the pre-eminent Japanese IC companies were
In 1970 the pre-eminent Japanese IC companies were
Good financial news is becoming a rarity these days so it's excellent to hear that British high-tech VCs didn't flinch during the year. Up to the end of Q3 they'd put £765 million into UK and Irish high-tech start-ups which, if Q4 was going to be normal which it probably won't be, would see the year closing out at £1 billion which is about the same as recent years.
'Ampex have been funded by the
So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of July 23rd 1969.
With the awful examples of Rambus and Qualcomm in front of it, it's a bold move by Spansion to decide to sue Samsung for patent infringement in a bid to establish itself as an IP licensing company.
Continue reading "'We Want To Be A Major Licensing House' - Cambou" »
There was once a semiconductor company with a simple, successful strategy: To make all the chips inside a PC except the microprocessor and the memory.
Continue reading "Fable: The Company Which Made The Chips Inside PCs." »
Here, according to the Global Semiconductor Alliance (the old Fabless Semiconductor Association) are the top ten fabless semiconductor companies measured by Q2 revenues:
Continue reading "Top Ten Fabless Semiconductor Companies " »
Quite clearly the financial authorities in the
One of the benefits, or tribulations, of being elected a head of state seems to be that every one and their dog lines up to tell you what to do.
Qualcomm has dropped the development of its successor to CDMA technology Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) and will re-focus its 4G effort on LTE.
Continue reading "You Only Get One Chance To Screw The Industry" »
As the bringer of Nemesis to the hubristic, there could be no more appropriate character than Gordon Brown.
Robert X Cringely, in his wonderful book Accidental Empires, tells a rib-tickling yarn about the early days pf Apple. It happened in the late 1970s when Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges.
A notable feature of the recent American election campaign was the grace of the speeches by the defeated candidates, and one wonders if this is something inherited from the Red Indians.
Interesting at Electronica to hear the semiconductor companies all banging on about applications. Not so many years back they were all banging on about breakthroughs. The next generation of chip, a new process technology or a new material..
Has profitability deserted the wireless business? After all it's inevitable that IC-based businesses commoditise. The first to do so were digital watches and electronic calculators. They commoditised quickly, going from units prices of several hundred dollars to single figure dollars in about five years.
At the back end of the '60s a new chip company set out to make MOS memories and microprocessors. It brought out the industry standard 16K DRAM, and led the memory market at the 16k and 64k generations.
Continue reading "Fable: Don't Get Into What You Don't Understand" »
Thanks to IC Insights for this one which came out last month.
The semiconductor industry has known for decades that 'only the paranoid survive' thanks to the great Andy Grove, and the object of paranoia in the semiconductor industry is the foundry industry.
Continue reading "Parallel Processing Speeds Timing Closure" »
If you want an object lesson in how to make money in the semiconductor industry, there's no one better to give it than a guy who's been doing just that for 27 years.
This was the headline of a story in Electronics Weekly dated July 16th 1969. The story starts:
'National Semiconductor is to open new factories in
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