On November 15th 1971 the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, Intel’s 4bit 4004, was advertised in Electronics News as a ‘micro-programmable computer on a chip’.

A 19.7% rise in September semiconductor shipments means that 2009 will see only a 10 per cent decline overall, Q409 sales will see a 6.4% rise, and next year will see a minimum of 22% growth, according to Europe’s leading semiconductor analysts Future Horizons.

“We’re heading into the post-PC era”, Sun co- founder and CEO Scott McNealy told Electronics Weekly in 1999, “NCs [Network Computers] are like Freddy – they’re coming back.”

Many years ago a British computer company decided it needed controlled access to a proprietary source of chips. In 1966, it set up a facility in Scotland to make RTL and DTL ICs. Later it moved into MOS and made an 8-bit computer using MOS technology.

Although Intel and AMD have 32nm processors which deliver 50% more integration than 45nm processes, the power requirement stays the same across the two generations.

The microprocessor is perhaps the most important development the electronics industry has seen for at least the last decade. It was introduced to meet the need for a universal large-scale integrated circuit brought about by the fairly high cost and narrow application of most LSI circuits. So starts a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition on Novemberb1975 in a section called ...

Ed the Serial CEO has had a pretty awful Christmas as his rellies quiz him on what he will do with the money he will make when his company IPOs, as planned, in 2010.

Looking ahead, Europe has lots of good opportunities to rebound, not in the mass market, but in 1000s of industrial applications where we are world-leading in innovative technologies, says Patrick Zammit, president of Avnet Electronics Marketing

“When I joined Intel it only had a hundred people”, recalls Federico Faggin, who designed the 4004, 8008 and 8080 and, after founding Zilog, the Z80, “Intel wasn’t making any money. It was struggling to become a viable company. The semiconductor memory business which Intel pioneered wasn’t coming on as fast as expected. Times were not good and that opened the ...

Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO of Xilinx talks to Electronics Weekly in the latest in a series of exclusive interviews where CEOs give their impressions of the last 12 months and point to the challenges and opportunities which lie ahead for the industry. In 2009, a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ analogy couldn’t be a more fitting description of the experience ...