News and New Products

Winners & Losers

By Ed Sperling -- Electronic News, 6/2/2006

Who’s Up?
It was a big week for AMD. The company invested $2.5 billion in its Dresden fab, then tried to dodge rumors that it’s looking to buy ATI, maker of graphics accelerators. Our bet is the acquisition won’t happen, but AMD certainly is getting lots of attention these days. Performance is up, sales are up and so is market attention. The company is even talking about a water-cooled quad-core gaming PC. Break out the antifreeze. 

The chipmaker also gave a name to its ecosystem strategy, which allows other companies to add co-processors for AMD’s architecture. It’s called Torrenza. Translated from Italian to English, that means…well…torrenza. Where do they find these names?

Tarari didn’t seem to notice. It committed to AMD’s Opteron and HyperTransport interface, a key part of Torrenza.

SunPower, the solar cell subsidiary of Cypress Semi, priced its IPO shares in hopes of raising $207 million. Looks like the oil companies aren’t the only ones reaping the benefits of higher gasoline prices.

You may not like all of the music on satellite radio, but by next year you’ll be able to hear it better using less power. Agere has created a single system on a chip for Sirius radios. Analog Devices’ DSP chips are being used, meanwhile, in XM radio, the satellite radio rival to Sirius.

Semtech sales were up 17 percent, driven by strong demand for portable electronics and communications equipment. And Microchip affirmed guidance that its sales were climbing 5 percent to 6 percent over its record Q4. There is strength in numbers.

Who’s Down?
You won’t find many political references in these virtual pages. We try hard not to mix politics and business at Electronic News because we don’t think they go together well, but in this case the timing looks really suspicious. The Bush Administration is so far down in the polls that it needs some sort of diversion. This is taking shape in the form of an expanding stock options investigation. The big question: Why now?

It’s not that the electronics industry’s upper management is always perfect (witness the happenings at Vitesse, the excesses of Tyco’s former CEO, and the long list of patent infringement lawsuits), but compared with other industries this one is squeaky clean all the way down to the nano level. So why is the federal government really going after electronics companies? And why isn’t it going after oil and defense companies? Could have something to do with their continued support for the current Administration while Silicon Valley has leaned the other way? So what if Halliburton got some unbid contracts or ExxonMobil is having its best year in the history of big oil?

Shareholders have shown their true colors. They’re looking at the options scandal as a chance to pick up some extra cash. Check out the lawsuit filed against Brooks Automation. That may explain why M-Systems didn’t file a public offering. Then again, maybe not. The company is headquartered in Israel.

The list goes on. KLA-Tencor is under investigation by the SEC. Rambus has started its own internal investigation. Ditto for AMCC. And what do we know that we didn’t know before? And this is costing how much?

Sun will cut 13 percent of its workforce. The once high-flying maker of network servers and multiprocessing servers—and before that, Unix workstations—never fully recovered after the dot-com bust. Here’s the proof. 

U.K startups looking for government funds can’t figure out how to get them. The money always lasts longer that way.

Speaking of the U.K., the National Weights & Measures Laboratory—the agency charged with overseeing the country’s RoHS enforcement—has come up with a set of uniform rules for all of Europe. This speaks volumes about trust across Europe, something that also explains why the U.K. still hasn’t adopted the Euro.