Category Archives: semiconductor

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

I went to Mike Muller’s keynote at ARM’s techcon3. He started with an interesting retrospective on ARM. They have shipped 15B units (4B in 2008 alone). They have 20+ processor cores, 600+ licensees. In the next 3 or 4 years … Continue reading →

I was at the ARM developer conference this week. Actually it has been renamed and is now called Techcon3, which seems pretty generic as branding. Anyway, one of the keynotes was by TJ Rodgers who started off by telling us … Continue reading →

Virage is on a roll right now. Originally a standard cell and memory company, it recently acquired a microprocessor line with ARC and now it has acquired another big increase in its size by taking on a lot of the … Continue reading →

I talked a couple of weeks ago about how it is necessary to be brutal and cull the managers of internal products in an acquisition otherwise the management of the joint product roadmap would become completely dysfunctional. Unless you’ve been … Continue reading →

One of the most important and under-rated tasks in a semiconductor company is creating the cost model. This is needed in order to be able to price products, and is especially acute in an ASIC or foundry business where there … Continue reading →

As I’ve pointed out before, most of the differentiation in the iPhone is in the software and the industrial design. Almost none is in the hardware which, especially in the first version, was all off-the-shelf not particularly special standard parts. … Continue reading →

I talked today to a company called Telegent Systems who make chips for adding TV to cell-phones. The bulk of their business is adding ordinary over-the-air analog TV to cell-phones. You’ve probably never seen this since the US is not … Continue reading →

At DAC, I happened to bump into Kaveh Massoudian of IBM, who is also the CTO of power.org, the consortium that deals with all things PowerPC. I previously met him when I was at Virtutech which was the era when … Continue reading →