Now Hear This!

There has been much uproar about the Wall Street Journal report released over the weekend claiming that 54-year-old Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago in Tennessee. Apple has not issued an official statement, nor is it expected to do so immediately as Jobs was out on medical leave at the time and the company has covered its legal bases by publicly stated that back in January when it vaguely announced its leader was suffering from a "hormone imbalance." Perhaps a statement will come when Jobs returns to his desk; he is slated to do so at the end of the month.

Holders of Apple stock, AAPL, have long criti...Read More

Will Moore's Law soon become no more? A new report from iSuppli Corp suggests that the law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and making up much of the foundation of the semiconductor industry, could be academic by 2014.

ISuppli argues that the high cost of semiconductor manufacturing equipment is making continued chip-making advancements too expensive for volume production. That, in turn, relegates Moore’s Law to the laboratory and "alters the fundamental economics of the industry," according to the market research company.

“The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nm, to 18-nm nodes,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for...Read More

For all the EDN readers who clicked on our story last week "Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, other engineers honored by National Inventors Hall of Fame" and wanted to know more about what Grove said when he accepted his lifetime achievement award on Saturday, May 2, check out the below YouTube video.

He is introduced by Ted Hoff, co-inventor of the microprocessor, who said of Grove, "Inventors tend to be dreamers, and Andy taught us how to turn dreams into reality."

Grove, himself, spent his short three-minute speech discussing the patent system and its issues. He received his award as the National Inventors Hall of Fame celebrated 50 years of the IC and honored 15 other engineers who have made significant contributions related to or enabled by semiconductors.

"As we ce...Read More

What's more contagious: H1N1 Flu, more commonly known as Swine Flu, or fear of H1N1 Flu? I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to guess it's the fear.

Swine Flu is a serious issue, one that demands precaution be taken to minimize further spread. But before more quarantines go into effect and before it gets to the level of panic that was seen with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) six years back, give yourself a little perspective. 

According to data updated today at 11am eastern by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 279 officially reported human cases of Swine Flu in the United States and a lone one death across 36 states. This editor's home state of New York has recorded about a quarter of the US cases, 73. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have bee...Read More

Apple is hiring chip gurus and the big question industry watchers are asking is why. I, as many others do, suspect the company is readying a chip design group and is rightfully doing so by recruiting some of the semiconductor industry's best and brightest for its team.

Let's review: According to reports, Apple recently hired Raja Koduri, a former CTO of AMD's graphics products group. Koduri follows Apple's hire of Bob Drebin, who had held the same position at AMD. The two engineers also both came from ATI's former Imageon handheld graphics division, which AMD sold off to Qualcomm at the beginning of the year.

And in January, Mark Papermaster was clear to work at Apple after the ex-IBM engineer fought a non-compete agreement. Papermaster has extensive experience in PowerPC architecture and just be...Read More

President Obama has named the United States' first national CTO and who it is came as somewhat of a surprise.

Aneesh Chopra wasn't even on the radar screen. Bets had been placed on big names including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bezos. Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the designers behind the TCP/IP architecture that made the Internet possible; Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University; and Larry Lessig, a public-minded scholar on law in the digital age and the founder of Stanford University's Center for the Internet and Society, has been among the lesser-known ...Read More

ADI is on it. Digi-Key is on it. ISuppli is on it. And now EDN is on it.

As part of our ever-striving effort to keep the electronics industry informed, we’ve joined Twitter, www.twitter.com/EDNmagazine, the now famed social media tool that allows short "tweets" to be sent directly to associates, called followers.

I first checked out Twitter for EDN more than a year ago, and in early 2008 shrugged it off as a fly-by-night waste of time that did little more than share the mundane blips of life. For the record, I also wrote off e-mail as a means of communication in the early 1990s, online reporting in the late 1990s, and blogging in the early millennium, considering all of them hollow and insignificant at their respective popular birth times. As I've since built a career in onl...Read More

Based on recent data from various sources, it appears the tech industry has a rosier employment picture than many other sectors.

According to a report out this week from TechAmerica, formed in December by the merger of AeA and the Information Technology Association of America, tech sustained only a 0.6% drop in employment, or 38,000 jobs, in Q4 2008 when total private-sector employment declined by 1.3%.

And the 0.6% drop didn't stop the sector from adding jobs in 2008 overall. TechAmerica reported that the high-tech industry added 77,000 net jobs last year, for a total of 5.9 million workers. 

To be true, TechAmerica also reported that while the 2008 tech job growth dipped compared to the 79,600 jobs added in 2007, it was notably down from the ...Read More

Here in NY, I have a small lemon tree tossed in-pot into my backyard. It's a house plant that's been bred to only grow to 5 feet in height maximum and that, due to my lack of a green thumb and any basic gardening skills, was left outside all year, un-watered for several months. Forced to suffer a long harsh east coast winter, it has lost all but a few leaves that are now brown, wind torn, and that crumble when touched.

Yet somehow -- perhaps insulated from the cold by the leaves and mud collected on its base, perhaps nourished serendipitously with snow and rain, and natural helpers like earthworms and rich soil -- this lemon tree is now once again showing buds. 

Were this a plant native to a NY-like climate I would not find this surprising. Evergreens, for example, thrive unattended in the cold. Lemon trees, however, are west coast, sun-loving, warmth-needing...Read More

With the April 1, 2009 H-1B visa application process start date just weeks away, reports from the Valley suggest that even though the number of US citizens on unemployment benefits recently hit a new high, high-tech employers will still lineup for H-1B applications seeking to claim an H-1B worker in the upcoming fiscal year.

As has been done in recent years, H-1Bs will be provided to 65,000 people chosen at random from a pool of petitions filed in the first five business days in April, allowing the selected foreigners to begin work at a the US company that filed for them in the fiscal year starting October 1. An additional 20,000 H-1Bs will be provided on behalf of persons excused from the cap under the “advanced degree” (...Read More

The Wall Street Journal today reported that IBM may soon bid $6.5 billion in cash for Sun Microsystems.

Such a price would represent a 100% premium over Sun's Tuesday close price and would make the acquisition IBM's largest buy in its history.

Sun, according to the WSJ article, has been shopping itself around. The company has been struggling for some time and in recent quarters put its focus on lower cost servers and software, while still showing success with Java.

IBM has had a few less-than-stellar quarters, but is far from struggling. With some $13 billion in cash, it could easily afford the rumored Sun buy. Big Blue, as exampled by its ThinkPad line sale to Lenovo in 2005, has been moving away from hardware and putting its focus on software and services.

The WSJ sources "peop...Read More

Quick, everyone, knock on wood. Cross your fingers. Hold your breath. And rub those rabbits' feet. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed more than 379 points today (Tuesday, March 10) and we don't want to jinx it.

The climb -- nearly a 6% gain -- marks the largest single day increase since November 2008 and is the closest thing we are going to get to a rally right now. It came this afternoon, just one day after stock price declines by tech companies like IBM brought stocks across the board down and the S&P 500 dropped 6.85 points to 676.53, its lowest close since September 1996.

That was after Warren Buffett said the economy has "fallen off a cliff" on CNBC and as economists continued to predict that the global economy will contract for the first time since World War II in 2009. W...Read More

It's official. AMD's shareholders have voted to spin out the chipmaker's manufacturing operations into "The Foundry Co," leaving AMD to focus on its designs.

As part of the "asset smart" carve out deal, AMD will issue 58 million shares and warrants to purchase 35 million shares to Mubadala Development Co. Mubadala-affiliated Advanced Technology Investment Company is expected to get around 66% of stake in The Foundry Co and Mubadala will own around 20% of AMD's outstanding shares after the transaction, which is expected to be completed by March 2.

When we last checked in on the AMD manufacturing spinout after the company in October 2008 announced initial plans and just as the downturn began to rear its ugly head, the lean of opinions had changed from a negative one -- one that...Read More

Microsoft has stolen a page from Apple's playbook and is planning retail stores, seemingly to help revise its image and battle its iPod making rival's sales gains.

With the retail locations, Microsoft said in a statement that it will "create a better PC and Microsoft retail purchase experience for consumers worldwide. … The purpose of opening these stores is to create deeper engagement with consumers and continue to learn firsthand about what they want and how they buy."

I'm immediately doubtful of this strategy's potential for success. True, the average PC shopper often needs a little help in determining their best purchasing option. And, true, many industry watchers were doubtful when Apple said it would open stores. It's now 200 strong locations contribute greatly to the company's iPod, iPhone, and Macintosh sales gains, even as the economy has...Read More

Until now, this blog has discussed the broader view of the DTV transition and asked readers opinions on the four-month delay in shifting to the digital format.

But the delay -- moving the DTV transition to June 12 from February 17 and approved by the House yesterday 264 to 158 -- will of course impact the specific semiconductor industry and its players. Take Qualcomm for example. After spending $550 million to acquire license in the FCC auction associated with the DTV transition, which frees up the 700-MHz spectrum, its MediaFLO mobile broadcast unit planned to increase its US footprint in major markets including Boston, Houston, Miami, and San Francisco on February 17, parallel to the analog-to-digital switch. Those plans are now on ice.

"We are disappointed with the passage of legislation extending the DTV transition date to June 12," Qualcomm said in ...Read More