yarns

Shanghai-based foundry SMIC has identified 463 fabless chip firms in China and says the demand for more is enormous. “We have identified 463 fabless semiconductor companies in mainland China, 120 of them are really promising,” Richard Chang, Founder, CEO and president of SMIC, told the IEE/FSA International Semiconductor Executive Forum in London in September 2004. “We’ve built five fabs there ...

Robots are becoming all the rage again with Elon Musk’s Optimus general purpose humanoid robot and all the investor enthusiasm for FigureAI. 20 years ago one of the industry’s visionaries was predicting this:- Robots will take over from the PC as the market and technology driver for the semiconductor industry, according to Dr Tsugio Makimoto, chief technology officer for Sony. ...

20 years ago the chip industry was facing an unprecedented setback – for the first time in its history a shrink was not delivering improvements in density, power, speed and cost. Density, speed and cost  benefits were still do-able but power was not. “The industry is facing a challenge which is unprecedented in its history,” said Dr Tsugio Makimoto, corporate ...

There is a very silly story about Einstein which one would like to hope is true. Einstein had a driver who used to sit at the back of the room when he gave his public lectures. One day when they were  in the car the driver said to Einstein that the theory of relativity was so simple that even he ...

“A trend is a trend is a trend But the question is: Will it bend? Will it alter its course through some unforeseen force And come to a premature end,” so doodled Sir Alec Cairncross Nowhere is this more true than in the semiconductor industry.  In  its mid-year forecast for 2000, IC Insights forecast a $250bn market for 2001. It ...

Atiq Raza who founded and was CEO of NexGen and then became President and COO of AMD, tells of his first meeting with Jerry Sanders. NexGen had created a superior 386 clone and Bill Gates, who had an interest in seeing multiple-sourced 386s, suggested to Raza that he ask AMD to fab it. “The first time I was introduced to ...

Morris Chang told a good yarn at last Friday’s opening of TSMC’s first fab in Japan. In the 1960s TI lobbied hard to get Japanese government approval to build a fab in Japan. In 1968, when the fab eventually materialised, Chang was a vp at TI. At last Friday’s ceremony  Chang recounted how,  when he first  met Akio Morita, Morita ...

19 years ago this was the question being asked in Washington. On the opening day of the 2oo4 EDA Tech Forum in San Jose the keynote speaker’s first question was: “Will Asia dominate IT?” Henry Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former member of several US administrations, said: “Asia has billions of brains with growing skills ...

21 years ago the semiconductor device manufacturers were highly disenchanted with the EDA industry. At Electronica 2002: Fred Shlapak, CEO of Motorola Semiconductor, said the EDA industry a consortium to sort out its problems because it was incapable of solving its problems on its own. Shlapak said that mask costs – which were rising towards the $2m to $3m level ...

21 years ago there was quite a debate going on about which standards would be adopted for mobile data. At the Intel IDF in Munich in 2002, Intel evp Sean Maloney argued that the WLAN industry must shun proprietary products and stick to using global standards in order to avoid starting a standards war and confusing consumers. “We do not ...