The Contrarian

      My hat's off to the board at ST Microelectronics for passing stronger measures to protect itself against any hostile buyout attempt. Such an attempt would most likely come from a leveraged buyout (LBO) firm or group of firms -- I certainly don't have that kind of cash. And it is also worth noting that not long ago the board at Cypress Semiconductor agreed it would avoid any buyout and try to resolve problems it faces through partnerships and other creative management.
        The leaders of these two companies recognize what other electronics executives are ...Read More

     Interesting story our sister publication reported recently on the impact of immigration on high tech startup activity. Specifically, the percent of high tech IPOs that were founded by immigrants.
     This might surprise people in the American heartland or Europe or elsewhere. But it certainly does not surprise anyone who knows our history or who has spent more than an hour passing through San Jose airport in the past 20 years. The steady flow of immigrants to America has fueled business innovation for 200 years, as it continues to do in the 21st century. 
      Want to know how international Silicon Valley has become? Just take a walk any Sunday afternoon in San Antonio Regional Park, which borde...Read More

    Excellent article in our sister publication this week on Qualcomm's continuing efforts to address the design once for multiple fabs problem.
     Having spent a day with Qualcomm executives at their San Diego headquarters in late September, I could not agree more with the writer's final conclusion:
     "Qualcomm is gradually coming to look very unlike the traditional, easily funded and easily managed fabless company. But it may be starting to resemble the future of the semiconductor industry."
      What this particular article does not touch on, but is certainly a part of the broader story, is Qualcomm's efforts to devise what could be called a ju...Read More

  Hardly a week passes without the annoucement of some major electronics initiative in Asia. Whether it is India, China, Vietnam or elsewhere, the Asian star continues to rise.
   This is, of course, great news for those Asian nations, their people and their economies. Probably for worldwide political stability, too. The Middle East should be on such a path.
   It remains to be seen, though, just how great this news is for America. American-based electronics companies will do just fine because...Read More

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    I see VC investing topped $6 billion for the third straight quarter, and it was recently announced that private equity funds will break the record for raising capital set in 2000. 
    Amounts raised and amounts invested are two important metrics for private investment, and on both measures such investment is growing like wildfire again.
     Nearly every analysis I've seen of what drove the Internet bubble and eventually burst it suggests that irrational exuberance fueled by a surfeit of funds caused the inflation and subsequent explosion. So if VC and other private investment funds are again becoming a big green machine it is important to remember that too much money can be a bad thing in an i...Read More

    In Japan this week, NTT DoCoMo began to market a mobile phone that can be set to alert a woman when she is starting to ovulate. The company managed to get front page coverage in at least a few newspapers. Read the Reuters story if you want to know more about how the device works.
    Don't scoff. This is a nation much concerned about its birth rate, a paltry 1.25 per woman, one of the lowest among developed nations. As a result, Japan has the fastest aging population among developed nations and there is a great deal of concern about who will support all the future octogenarians. Making babies and encouraging the making of babies has become something of a national passion.
      This ...Read More

    From the looks of things here in Japan, any economic sanctions against North Korea will have only a small effect on the Japanese economy and not much impact on the electronics industry.
    For years, Japan was North Korea's third largest trading partner in combined imports and exports, but a distant third behind China and South Korea, which together accounted for two-thirds of all trade between North Korea and the outside world. In part because of North Korea's continuing belligerence, Japan began to trim its import/export activity with it a few years ago. 
    Japan has now slipped to North Korea's fourth largest trade partne...Read More

     Another report from Japan.
     When it comes to the mobile phone, I usually think of Japan as a leader. I remember seeing Japanese teenagers fiddling with their cell phones on the trains a few years before you started to see widespread use by American kids.
      To some extent, Japan adopted cell phones more quickly than North America because it lagged in home adoption of the PC; the cell phone became the surrogate for emailing and Internet surfing.
     Anyway, I was surprised to learn that Japan is only this week rolling out mobile phone number portability. This of course allows the user to keep her number whenever she changes carriers. It has been in use in several of the lar...Read More

    Whatever else you might say about Transmeta, you have to love its nerve. From the very beginning (founded 1995; first product 2000), this has been a David and Goliath story, with Transmeta challenging Intel and AMD on power efficiency in the x86 microprocessor. Too bad David didn't have enough stones in his sling. Transmeta got out of the chip business and transitioned into selling IP more than a year ago, including to such Japanese heavyweights as Toshiba, Sony, NEC and Fujitsu.
      Now, without blinking an eye, it is going toe to toe again with Goliath, this time in court: ...Read More

      I find it sad. A pioneer technologist who broke ground in an important segment of the electronics industry leaves the company he founded due to the accelerating stock option scandal. So does the man who was his number one lieutenant over the years.
      I refer to Ken Levy, and the announcement by KLA-Tencor that he would retire immediately as chairman and as an employee. Ken Schroeder, the man who replaced Levy as CEO and served in that capacity from 1999 until 2005, and then became an adviser to the company, has also been cut loose by KLA-Tencor, which is trying to put the back-dating options scandal behind it as quickly as possible. 
        After the ...Read More

      A recent salary study by Steven Hall Partners found that the median total compensation (cash, stock, etc.) for independent directors on corporate boards at the 500 largest U.S. companies rose from $162,363 in 2005 to $185,000 in 2006, a 14-percent increase.
     The average Silicon Valley engineer got no such salary increase, but that's another story.
    When I saw that figure, I wondered how this year's most-written- about directors had fared by comparison. I refer, of course, to the directors at Hewlett Packard. Hold onto your wallets.
    For all the bad press they've reaped,...Read More

     While I'm in Japan for the next several weeks I'll occasionally weigh in on the Japanese electronics industry. Here's one item.
     Noboyuki Idei, who has the title of Sony Advisory Board Chairman, told a conference in Barcelona this week that Howard Stringer was the right choice to lead Sony nearly two years ago, but the next CEO will be Japanese and young -- say, 40 to 45 years old.
     Idei's comments came less than a week after disgruntled stockholders dumped Sony shares. So, the blogosphere speculates that ...Read More

      For the good of the industry, I propose a moratorium on intellectual property lawsuits between EDA companies. Maybe then they could accomplish something useful, like developing the next generation tools before the semiconductor industry needs them. 
      What’s with these EDA guys? Yeah, I know they have to protect their assets and all that. But they’re spending way too much energy suing each other and not enough working together to solve the industry's many problems. 
          One analyst recently told me:
         "The EDA industry is lagging. They need to pr...Read More

      The continuing Hewlett-Packard mess has become an easy and almost daily target for the business press blogosphere. 
      In the latest chapter of this tawdry tale, Patricia Dunn, ex-chairperson of HP, and four others involved in the spy scandal, have been charged with felonies under California state law and face the possibility of jail time. 
       Current CEO Mark Hurd, who says he knew about the probe but not the details, dodged the bullet: The state of California did not indict him. 
       We also learned...Read More