Mannerisms

The Intel story is the most gripping drama the semiconductor industry has seen for many years. Next year is the year that it plans to regain industry process leadership but this year the USA’s  most influential  chip industry financial analyst Stacy Rasgon says that Intel’s issues are “approaching the existential”. The shares are down from 60 to 20; it made ...

The 24 prisoner swap between the US and Russia in Ankara earlier this month was the biggest post-Cold War prisoner swap since the West and Russia exchanged 27 prisoners in 1985. Last week the US received 16 prisoners back from Russia and Russia got 8 prisoners back from the US, among them Vadim Krasikov, convicted in Germany in 2021 of ...

Thanks to TrendForce for this one – the top five SiC suppliers:

The USA  has won the most medals in the Summer Olympics since 1896, says data from the Olympedia website. US athletes have won a total of 2,655 medals – 1,070 gold, 841 silver and 744 bronze. The second most successful nation is the USSR, which only took part between 1952 and 1988. In just ten summer events, Soviet athletes won 395 ...

INSTALLATION of the first commercial television station in Ottawa has now been completed by Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd. This follows the supply and installation by Marconi’s of two commercial television stations in Montreal, which are now in operation. So, 63 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of March 29th 1961 The story continued: The Ottawa equipment ...

After the 2023/24 announcement of new sites, Italy has now got 60 UNESCO world heritage sites  – the largest number of any country. Italy’s newest addition is the 800-kilometer-long Via Appia, the “oldest and most important of the great roads built by the Ancient Romans”, according to UNESCO. China is the runner-up with 59 sites. Two of these, the Beijing ...

Training is the big deal -,governments are spending bundreds of billions on semiconductor facilities which lack the hundreds of thousands of staff needed to operate them, Ed confides to his diary. The opportunity is obvious – governments will pay for setting up of courses in semiconductor disciplines and will pay the fees of the students who attend them. Companies will ...

At the 2004 DAC a subtle but immensely significant shift was observed in the electronics industry since the 2003 DAC. While small EDA companies still looked to get acquired by the Big Three, they were now looking to build strategic relationships well beyond that trio of established players. The new circle included systems vendors that also have their own foundry ...

Data recently published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows that China accounts for around two-thirds of the world’s processing/refining capacity for critical minerals. China currently accounts for more than half of the world’s refining of aluminum, lithium and cobalt, around 90 percent of that of rare earth metals and manganese and 100 percent of that ...

CEOs are sometimes larger than life individuals whose careers have surprising outcomes. Among these are are ten who shared an unusual executive experience. They are; Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, John Rigas, Sanjay Kumar, Walter Forbes, Joe Nacchio, Richard Scrushy, Sam Waksal, Martin Grass. Moral: If You Can’t Be Good Be Careful

It’s natural to be in awe of prominent and successful people and to wonder if you could hold your own with them if you ever met up. My personal experience is that the more successful people are, the easier they are to understand. Listening to a couple of tech Titans, each with several tens of billions of dollars, talk together ...

GenAI for procurement is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, according to Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions. Rapid adoption and a multitude of credible use cases will quickly move GenAI to the Plateau of Productivity within two years. ”GenAI can already enhance many different workflows in procurement and 73% of procurement leaders at the start of ...

Thanks to TrendForce for this one – the top ten foundries in Q1:

Trainium and Inferentia sound like a couple of Roman matrons you see in tongue-in-the-cheek dramas about Ancient Rome. Trainium maybe a bit of a dom, Inferentia more of a snidey gossip. They are Amazon’s names for its AI chips – one for training AI programmes, the other for inferencing – running the programmes. When the tech evolves a bit more ...

A BLOOD pressure transducer the size of a match-stick and an ultrasonic blood flow measuring device were among topics discussed at a meeting between leading British heart surgeons and engineers in London last week. So, 63 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 5, 1961. The story continued: Held at the Post Graduate Medical School of ...

TSMC’s financials have seen an inexorable post-pandemic rise. The company had annual revenue of $35.7 billion in 2019 for $11.5 billion profit and a couple of years later, profits and market cap had doubled while revenues had increased by $22 billion, according to TSMC annual reports and data from CompaniesMarketCap.com. According to CSIMarket data, the net margin for semiconductor companies ...

A mediaeval booby called Garter King of Arms has been giving me grief, Ed confides to his diary. This bygone relic has written to me saying that my commercialisation of my Coat of Arms is contrary to the practices of the College of Arms and must end Naturally, I told him to stick his whinge up his tabard, at which ...

The successor to the fabless and chipless semiconductor business models will be the designless chip company, according to a panel of industry experts at the 2005/Globalpress Sunmmit Conference in Monterey. “Companies are going to be designless as well as fabless – they’ll have product marketing people, and product definition people, and no one else,” said Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO ...

A key reason why people don’t buy an EV is the lack  infrastructure, says a survey by Statista Consumer Insights. In several northern and western European countries, upwards of one in five people said that this was the case. In Norway, which already has a stronger EV infrastructure, only eight percent of respondents said the same. The share of respondents ...

2000 years ago a guy wrote a poem entitled  ‘On The Nature Of Things’ which explained Epicurean physics presenting  the principles of atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, the development and use of materials, tools, and weapon, the evolution of  species by natural selection and ...