This week in gEEk: Green has some seeing red; Samueli’s get out of jail free card; more layoffs...

Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN’s short review of the week’s happenings.

Bill Gates resigns from everyday life at Microsoft today. Unlike the combined hundreds of manufacturing employees laid off at IBM and Mattson this week, Bill won’t be looking for another salaried gig. Instead, he’s made the life-altering decision to devote his time to charitable organization the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates makes the move as Vista issues continue to plague the PC industry, and Mac sales continue to gain more cubicle space in America’s offices. What will Steve Jobs send Gates as a retirement present? Perhaps a busted up Monopoly game, accompanied by a copy of Apple’s financials.

Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli played his get out of jail free card this week, entering a guilty plea for making materially false statements to the SEC in the company’s criminal stock-option backdating case. We outside the legal community call this lying. One attorney EDN spoke to said that while Samueli won’t be required to testify as part of the plea, he’ll be called by Henry Nicholas’ lawyers and if he does take the stand, the defense will try to “cut him to ribbons.” So much for any friendship left between them.

Meanwhile, Credence and LTX, once rivals in the test arena, announced plans to merge. EDN Editor in Chief Rick Nelson spoke to both company CEOs and shared his take on plans for the combined company, ones that include shuttering 15 duplicate offices, addressing ATE customer concerns, and possibly combining R&D efficiencies. 

Nokia also buddied up this week, taking control of Symbian with a $412 million offer. The cellphone maker then partnered with AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST, TI, and Vodafone to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ, and MOAP(S), creating one open mobile software platform. According to analysts, this will lead to cheaper smartphones for the mass market and higher volumes for Nokia, and will challenge Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Analysts also suggest the move is the result of pressure from the Linux industry, forcing Nokia and Symbian to change their game. 

Also on the phone front, market researchers at iSuppli conducted a "virtual teardown" of Apple’s 3G iPhone and estimate that with a retail price of $199 the handset will carry an initial hardware bill of materials and manufacturing cost of $173. About $30 of that is memory. 

iSuppli separately estimated this week that by 2010 the amount of investment going into the solar industry will equal the investment going into the overall semiconductor industry. The company expects global production of PV cells to rise to as much as 12 GW (gigawatts) by 2010, up from 3.5 GW in 2007. 

Alternative energy is a big part of the green push, but going green isn’t always such a good thing. IPC’s Fern Abrams shared her concerns on the green movement as a 2008 EDN Innovator. The industry organization also commented Wednesday on a recent meeting it held on the proposed revisions to ROHS in Brussels, saying that recommendations to ban some commonly used flame retardants from electronics design are “arbitrary and lack a sound scientific basis.” 

Greenpeace might disagree with IPC. The US-based environmental group this week criticized several electronics OEMs for not taking the responsibility it feels they should on climate change, e-waste, and chemicals usage. 

And John McCain jumped on the green electronics bandwagon this week saying that if he is elected he would propose awarding a $300 million prize to the auto company that develops a next-generation car battery that weans America off oil. McCain’s campaign rhetoric most likely points toward some form of a lithium-ion battery that allows for either an all-electric vehicle or an extended-range version. EDN PowerSource Author Margery Conner points to a big pothole in McCain’s proposal and on the road to electric vehicles: Batteries based on lithium-ion technology may be hard to come by. 

Will the award have tree-hugging voters eating out of McCain’s hand? We’ll see. But if they are users of Tektronix’s latest real-time spectrum analyzer, they won’t have a hand to spare. While the company describes the analyzer — a $22,900, rechargeable-battery-operated, 10-kHz to 6.2-GHz SA2600 — as a handheld instrument, EDN Contributing Technical Editor Dan Strassberg disagrees. Most people consider a handheld unit to be something that you can hold in one hand, he contends, but few people, if any, can hold a 10×13×4.8-in., 12.27-lb unit that way. Despite its definition, Tektronix seems to get that and includes a sleeve so users can slip the instrument over one forearm and operate the controls with their other hand. The SA2600 also incorporates Tektronix’s proprietary DPX digital-phosphor technology, which until this week was unavailable in any spectrum analyzer smaller than a benchtop unit.

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