Electro Ramblings

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 ...

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. ...

There’s a great interview with Tony Blair over at New Scientist, a sister publication to Electronics Weekly, where the Prime Minister says science is vital to society. New Scientist editor Jeremy Webb managed to get into number 10 to speak to the PM – no mean feat for a consumer science publication – and the result is the Tony Blair ...

A recent round table discussion brought together a group of LED lighting experts, with the talk centred around the possibility of high power LEDs replacing the general purpose market for bulbs. ..the use of higher power LEDs as general purpose lighting sources, which have the potential to replace filament bulbs and even fluorescent tubes, has now become one of the ...

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 ...

Costs, and not just performance, may be the driving factor behind the uptake of silicon-on-insulator, according to an interesting piece by Richard Wilson on Electronics Weekly, where he asks Is silicon-on-insulator technology mainstream? SOI on a chip from IBM Microprocessor developer ARM is quickly establishing itself as the core provider of libraries to the semiconductor industry, and has recently signed ...

Over at Electronic News, the US-based sister publication of Electronics Weekly, they’ve got a run down of the week’s winners and losers in the electronics industry. It’s interesting to note that the EDA firms are doing well, due to increased design activity – which can only bode well for the future of the whole industry. The piece also points out ...