Nov 15 2009 2:09AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |
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A couple of weeks ago I spent a morning at NXP’s innovation day. The first slightly surreal aspect of it was that it was in a building I used to work in. After I left VLSI Technology, NXP (then Philips Semiconductors, don’t forget that final “s”) made a successful bid for VLSI and then consolidated their operations in silicon valley into the 4 buildings that VLSI had purchased when its landlord had gone bankrupt. After several rounds of layoffs there are apparently just 250 people working in buildings that I would guess could accommodate 10 times that many people.

Since NXP was spun out of Philips they have divested themselves of their wireless business (sold to ST and now consolidated int...Read More

Nov 13 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |
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I’ve talked before about just how amazing Apple’s performance in the cell-phone (and laptop) market is. Last quarter, only two years after entering the cell-phone market, Apple became #1, at least if you measure by how much money they made rather than how many phones they shipped.

Apple shipped 7.4 million iPhones for $4.5 billion but they made more profit on them than Nokia made on the 108.5 million phones they shipped for $10.36 billion. Strategy Analytics estimated (since Apple doesn’t tell) that Apple made a profit of $1.6 billion whereas Nokia made only $1.1 billion.

I had a slide from Morgan Stanley at the ICCAD meeting last week that showed that iPhone is the fastest ever adoption of a consumer electronics technology. Actually, that’s not rea...Read More

Nov 11 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Well, Jim Hogan and my discussion at ICCAD prompted a various feedback in the blogosphere. For those that missed it, my summary of what we said is here. An up to date list of all the blog entries we know of his here and you can dowload the presentation here (pdf).

Other people's opinion on what we said is here:

• Pallab Chatterjee
• Olivier Coudert

...Read More

Nov 10 2009 12:28PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Last week was the EDAC Kauffman Award dinner. One minor advantage of being a blogger is that I got invited along as press. “Will blog for food”. This year’s winner was Professor Randal Bryant, usually just known as Randy Bryant.

I knew of Randy as the inventor of switch level simulation with a tool called MOSSIM. Up until that point, all simulation of semiconductor had been done using Spice type algorithms, worrying about the transfer functions of the transistors. But with the coming of Mead and Conway, computer scientists were starting to want a much simpler model of the world so that they could apply programming techniques to design. Treat transistors as switches that were either on or off and with a unit delay (all transistors turned on and off at the same speed). MOSSIM...Read More

Nov 3 2009 7:21AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |
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Yesterday at ICCAD, Jim Hogan and I led an discussion on the megatrends facing electronics and the implications going forward for EDA. Basically we took a leaf out of Scoop Nisker's book, who when he finished reading the news would sign off with "if you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." So we tried to.

Anyone whose being reading this blog regularly won't be surprised at the position that we took. I managed to find some interesting data from Morgan Stanley about how electronics is growing but it is also fragmenting. PCs ship in 100s of millions; cell-phones in billions (t...Read More