This Week's Winners & Losers

Why are Synopsys’ competitors smirking? Why does the European Commission have two faces? And why does it suddenly feel cooler at Motorola’s headquarters? All this and more…

Who’s Up?
Fab utilization rates hit nearly 90 percent in Q2. Considering that most IDMs run their fabs at 50 percent or less, that may seem astronomical. In contrast, some foundries run their fabs at more than 100 percent when opportunity knocks. Our take is this is weighted on the right side of the scale.

Sony will open a $98 million lithium ion polymer battery plant in Singapore. We’re not exactly sure if this is good or bad news, considering Sony batteries had to be recalled by most of the major laptop computer makers on the planet, although we’ll take this as a positive step that the company is trying to fix the problems. But why Singapore?

Cadence and Mentor Graphics have created a free, open-source System Verilog methodology. More interesting, however, is this is a way to pull the rug out from their chief competitor, Synopsys, which has been trumpeting its proprietary version. It may be an unfair comparison, but consider what Linux did to proprietary versions of Unix. The clincher is that market leaders can’t argue collusion by competitors if its open source because, at least in theory, there’s equal opportunity for all.

Applied Material’s sales were up a meager 1 percent last quarter. That’s not bad, considering that SEMI’s book to bill ratio was down. The good news out of SEMI’s numbers is that 2007 will at least be flat with 2006.

At least part of the driver there is the DRAM market, which is expected to grow during the second half. Prices are expected to be up, too, as production lags demand. That may account for the fab utilization rates being higher.

From the gee-whiz department, Rensselaer Polytechnic researchers claim to have developed a high-energy battery or capacitor that looks and feels like paper—only it withstands high and low temperatures. The secret is embedding nanotubes in cellulose fiber, which can act as liquid. It’s good to see something new out of battery technology. Just imagine how many sheets of this paper-like device you can fit into a car body without adding weight.

Motorola won a $394 million contract with China Mobile Communications to expand its GSM network there, solidifying its bottom line and allowing its creditors to call off their repo men. Moto can even turn the air conditioning back on. It gets hot in Illinois. 

Who’s Down?
Brooks Automation’s CEO, Edward Grady, is stepping down next month, the second CEO to leave in three years. This is beginning to look like a scene out of the movie, "This is Spinal Tap," where the band’s drummers kept exploding. 

VMware shares nearly doubled on the opening day of its IPO, thereby proving that efficiency is now a hot topic, so to speak. The problem is that inside of data centers, most of the servers are running in single digits of capacity, while still generating the same amount of heat as if they were running at 80 percent capacity. Virtualization software can solve some of that, But that also means fewer server sales while that efficiency is added and, in turn, fewer processors being sold. It’s a good thing that Intel is an investor in this company.

The European Commission authorized a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel in flash memory. The question is why. While this isn’t a bad deal, the real question is why the EC is allowing this but accusing Intel of running a monopoly in Europe. Presumably, this will make Intel stronger in flash, where the field is far more fractured than in computer processors. That raises the question, if ST was Intel, would the EC crack down on one of its own? This is like one bureaucracy with two faces.