Mannerisms

In 1952, over  a hundred technologists from 26 companies – big and small, US and foreign – turned up at Bell Labs for an eight day course on how to make transistors. Each company had paid $25,000 to attend and, at the end of it, they got a copy of this book which became known as Ma Bell’s Cookbook.

If I was the minister for technology and wanted to know what to do to help the UK semiconductor industry, I would get on a train to Maldon in Essex and knock on the door of CML Microsystems who have been running a UK chip business for 55 years. So far as I know, the company has never lobbied for ...

The rapid dissemination of semiconductor technology which characterised the early chip industry gave the entrepreneurial companies the drop over established companies. One of the wheels that propelled this rapid spread of knowledge was this one: Underneath it, engineers from many companies shared the knowledge and insights which drove the scorching pace of the industry’s early days. Moral: Multiple heads are better than ...

Donald Trump raised around $54 million in the first six month of the year – far ahead of Ron DeSantis ($19.7 million) and Vivek Ramaswamy ($19.2 million, largely from self-financing), according to the US Federal Election Commission (FEC). However, the filings also show that this money – as well as money raised in 2022 and in possession of the Trump ...

Postponing the 2030 date for stopping the sale of new ICE cars is on the political agenda however, if  it is not postponed, the government will have another dilemma: How should it tax imports of Chinese EVs? Forvia CEO Patrick Kolker says the Chinese can build an EV for €10,000 euros less than European companies.. In Europe, the average price ...

Thanks to Gartner for this one – the top ten strategic trends: Digital Immune System Applied Observability AI Trust, Risk and Security Management Industry Cloud Platform Platform Engineering Wireless-Value Realization Superapps Adaptive AI Metaverse Sustainable Technology

Six candidates for the Republican nomination in the 2024 US presidential primaries have so far met the criteria to participate in the first Republican National Committee debate, scheduled for August 23, according to the website FiveThirtyEight. Those who have since July 1 managed to poll at at least 1% in three eligible polls and have gathered at least 40,000 individual donors (out ...

PROPOSALS to set up an Institute of Automation that would keep Britain well to the fore in the field of automatic control were put forward in London last week. It is suggested that the Institute should be a co-operative effort of the Government, the universities and industry. So, 63 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of October 5th ...

Morris Chang, TSMC’s founding CEO, made a couple of cracks at the opening of TSMC’s global R&D HQ (pictured) in Hsinchu at the weekend. Chang related a warning tale from his TI days when the chairman recommended a book which dated the start of the decline of the Royal Navy from the completion of the Admiralty Building, reports SemiWiki Now ...

Wars are always a good opportunity to make money – governments will spend any money to win them – and it riled me that people are making shed-loads of wonga from the Russian imbroglio but not me, Ed confides to his diary. Then, through an old chip industry mate, I found this one-man  East End import/export business which sold second ...

In his book, Marketing High Technology, Bill Davidow tells a story of how Intel nearly got into a joint venture in France. “The French government approached Intel about entering into a JV with a domestic company,” writes Davidow, “most of Intel management was dead-set against the proposals, but Bob Noyce and I were for it.” “I made an extremely simple ...

Gartner’s 2023 Storage Hype-Cycle sees the demise of Storage Class Memory (thanks to Intel canning Optane), Copy Data Management, Enterprise Information Archiving, Persistent Memory DIMMs, and Management Software-Defined Storage. Hybrid Cloud File Data Services had a rapid ascent to the Peak Of Inflated Expectations but is now heading for the Trough Of Disillusionment.

A very famous, Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist was given, in WWII, two Nobel medals for safe-keeping by two German Nobel laureates. Hitler hated the Nobel Prizes and forbade Germans to accept them and, if the Nazis found these medals, the physicists would probably face death. When Germany invaded Denmark the Danish physicist was in a quandary about what to do ...

Everyone knows who sends the most chips to Russia – Vlad’s ‘forever friend’ Xi – but, without a heads-up, not many would guess the No.2 exporter of ICs to Russia. That’s because it’s the cocktail and scuba mecca of The Maldives, reports the  Nikkei, quoting Russian customs data from the Indian research firm Export Genius. And it’s not that the ...

One man’s subsidy is another man’s blow to supply chain resilience it seems, as Globalfoundries CEO Tom Caulfield criticises the $20 billion being proposed in German subsidies for fabs. Caulfield told the FT that, if subsidies disproportionately benefit one company, then “there is a real risk of dependence on a single supplier, market foreclosure and less resilient supply chains as ...

Thanks to Semiconductor Intelligence for this one – the top 15 IC companies in Q1:

Those US chip CEOs lobbying the US government for less restrictions on their China trade, should be wary of fulfilling Lenin’s prophecy that: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them”. For the chip industry, which has long been based on international interdependence, the current US restrictions are a particular challenge because China is their biggest ...

62 years ago this was a column in Electronics Weekly’s edition of January 25th 1961.    

Netflix now boasts 238 million subscribers worldwide after adding 7.7 million in the first half of this year. Latin America, the USA, Canada and Asia-Pac added between 1.1 and 1.2 million subscribers, but  EMEA grew most with 2.4 million net paid subscriptions added. Paid sharing has seemingly been adopted well, with the additional fees for up to two account users not ...

What does the chip industry want? Ed asks his diary, replying: More perfornance without any increase in power. Always has; has always will. Can we do that? A lot of wonga is going into optical and I need a way to get my share. CAGR market projections of 50% for a decade are being batted about for marrying up electronics ...