This week in gEEk: EDN’s weekly review

Editor’s note: Although I would love to think that our news readers here on EDN.com come back to our site multiple times a day and open every one of our newsletters, reading each one thoroughly, I don’t like to kid myself. You’re busy. We at EDN get that.  And we also get that our readers are some of the most influential, most innovative engineers and executives this industry has ever seen. It’s our job to keep you informed on what’s happening in our high-speed industry, and like the many designers and managers reading these words now, we here on EDN’s news desk are always striving to better our products (our articles and commentary) and know that if we don’t serve our readers in a way that fits their needs, we’re as useful as the Sony Walkman in this iPod era.

We will continue to bring you breaking news and fill our daily newsletter Electronic News Today with coverage of the day’s dealings and analysis of the industry at large.  We still hope you’ll visit EDN.com and click through our newsletters as often as possible. But starting today, we’re offering a short review of the week’s happenings in this blog, one that we on the news desk have playfully named “This week in gEEk.” Look for This week in gEEk every Friday in our Now Hear This! blog and in Electronic News Today. As always, your comments are welcome. So post your thoughts below. As our goal here is to best use our reader’s valuable time and as I’ve already chatted up our plans and industry for two full paragraphs, I’ll proceed with our first This week in gEEk post immediately below.
Happy reading!
–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News

This week in gEEk, June 15 - 20, 2008

Cadence Design Systems wants to make the already small EDA world even smaller. The EDA leader this week announced that it has been pursing the acquisition of its rival Mentor Graphics and has so far offered up some $1.6 billion in cash. EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson speculated based on comments he heard at last week’s Design Automation Conference that Cadence may be trying to stave off a significant drop in revenue by offering very long-term license agreements to its major accounts and is making the move more so to acquire Mentor’s future revenue stream, and less so for its technology or customer base. Analysts suggest that the hostile takeover attempt, as hostile takeovers tend to do, will get “real ugly, real soon.”

Speaking of ugly, check out Motorola’s stock price this week. It sank to $7.61 on Thursday, a new five-year low for the struggling company. Even worse, the MOT stock slide followed layoffs made to Motorola’s R&D group the week before.

On the reverse, Broadcom’s stock, BRCM, climbed this week after the ITC (International Trade Commission) rejected claims made by GPS chip maker SiRF that Broadcom infringed two of its patents. That positive Broadcom news was overshadowed by the latest on company co-founder and ex-CEO Henry T Nicholas III, who this week pleaded not guilty to the narcotics and securities fraud charges against him. EDN readers shared their views of the fallen industry leader and his plea in this blog post, which discusses how Nicholas seemingly led two lives: one where he was a political crusader and top communications chip engineer, and one where he allegedly hired prostitutes and used and distributed a wide variety of drugs, from ecstasy, to pot, to cocaine, to speed.

Meanwhile, AMD and Nvidia were all about speed this week, the non-narcotic form, that is. The two competitors each released teraflop GPUs designed to run critical workloads such as financial analysis or seismic processing.

What won’t be speedy is the economic recovery. Minimal semiconductor industry growth in Q1 will be matched by minimal growth in Q2, Gartner said this week. But the research company isn’t disappointed and said it was encouraged on the full year by the expected flat sequential growth. 

Gartner’s buzz of optimism was offset, however, by a Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) report on May book to bill. For the first time since 2005, North American semi equipment bookings exhibited a year over year decline. SEMI reported May produced a 0.79 ratio at a 37% decrease from May 2007. The ratio showed that $79 worth of orders was received for every $100 of product billed for the month.

Solar continues to be a semiconductor industry bright spot, with industry giants IBM and Intel making headlines this week. IBM teamed with Tokyo Ohka Kogyo aiming to make less-expensive, user-friendly solar energy.  And Intel spun off key assets of a start-up business effort inside its new business initiatives group to form independent company SpectraWatt Inc.  

On a separate but somewhat related note, EDN Technical Editor Margery Conner this week did a blog series examining power on Mars, the first of which, “Dust devils clean up solar arrays” can be found here and the last of which, “Download this free Mars sun clock,” concluded Thursday and discussed how to determine maximum solar energy with a Mars sun clock.

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