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Jul 18 2008 10:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN's short review of the week's happenings.

"Jobs" was a strong buzzword this week, both as in employment and in terms of Apple.

Let's start with employment. AMD shareholders finally got their wish (well, not their true wish—the chipmaker did take a $1.2 billion charge, after all) when the company's board evicted Hector Ruiz from the CEO spot. While president and COO Dirk Meyer—an engineer who worked on the original Athlon—ascends to CEO, Ruiz isn't exactly out of a job; he's been named executive chairman in the culmination of a succession plan that the company assures us was in the works for two years.

Speaking of engineers in power, the power sector was touted by Yahoo HotJobs as an industry full of engineering career opportunity this week, just after On Semiconductor (in addition to acquiring Catalyst Semiconductor) announced it would be adding an R&D center in Ireland and in doing so will create about 20 new jobs there. Of course that's about 10% of what the power player announced it would cut in March, but who's counting. …

Apple's counting and they stopped counting when they hit a million. Steve Jobs and company sold more than a million 3G iPhones over the weekend and at last look, lines were still forming at Apple stores to buy the second-generation handsets. That's not just good news for the consumer-electronics giant, but for companies like Infineon and TriQuint, which teardowns revealed had technology in the 3G iPhone.

So cell phones are selling, despite our nation's dwindling disposable income. Gartner backed the cell phone industry, as well as the PC industry this week, reporting that the semiconductor industry saw "relatively robust" sales for the first half of the year, thanks in part to the two markets. Looking forward, Gartner predicted continued sales growth for the second half and suggested that the semiconductor industry might just get through this economy bruised but not beaten.

Intel sure isn't taking a beating. The company beat Wall Street expectations with its Q2 numbers. Intel also unveiled its Centrino 2 platform this week and, even though EDN's fiscal frugality Brian Dipert didn't wait for Montevina when it came to his recent PC purchase, he still discusses the platform's additional dual-core Penryn CPU flavors, included and lacking wireless, and other tech tidbits in his two-part Brian's Brain blog post as part of an update on his Mac/PC usage.

Although its own house is in order while its chief competitor is struggling, Intel continues to get swatted by those pesky government regulators. The European Commission this week leveled additional charges that Intel has violated the EU's rules against "abuse of a dominant position." The microprocessor giant's initial, informal response to the charges, which include offering discounts to retailers for exclusivity, blamed AMD for instigating the action and threw up the consumer benefit of lower prices in its defense.

In more executive changes, Tensilica founder Chris Rowen sidestepped from CEO to CTO, welcoming Jack Guedj as the new chief executive officer. Jackson Hu also resigned his CEO responsibilities at foundry UMC this week in the midst of the Semicon West tradeshow.

IBM's Bernie Myerson keynoted Semicon West Tuesday and pointed to Big Blue's $1.5 billion fab, R&D, and capital equipment investments. He also discussed the need for industry collaboration to reach future semiconductor innovations. Bernie, as always, made his statements in an eloquent manner with plenty of facts and figures to back his point, but in the end it boils down to what your kindergarten teacher called the "buddy system." Buddy up, or get left behind as the innovation bus drives away.

IMEC understands the buddy system. The Leuven, Belgium-based nanoelectronics research institute inked a deal with Qualcomm to research 3-D integration. Qualcomm joins the already established IMEC 3-D technical research program, which focuses on 3-D wafer-level packaging and 3-D stacked ICs to find applications for the cost-effective use of 3-D interconnects at different levels of the wiring hierarchy in a chip, and aims to include the development and demonstration of the IP and tools necessary for designing in 3-D.

There's also the "strength in numbers" saying, which EDN's Ann Mutschler suggests in her Sandbox blog is one of the reasons 450-mm wafer sizes could be piloted by 2012. That's when Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have said they want a 450-mm wafer pilot line by. Combine their revenue and capital spending, and you'll understand why there hasn't been significant pushback from the industry.

Of course, when strong powers come together, they can sometimes create monsters so swelled with power that smaller companies need to take cover. Kind of like a tornado, which, by the way, we just recorded here on Long Island last month. While I've been down in my basement, Editorial Intern Melissa D'Amico has been busy examining the harboring of tornadoes as our next great source of energy. Insert your favorite Dorothy reference here.

Have something to say on the above noted happenings? Share your comments on this week's news and analysis below.

--Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News