The big semiconductor news this week is the legal action TSMC is taking against former Senior Vice President Wei-Jen Lo. This looks to be a serious game of 3D chess between CC Wei and Lip-Bu Tan so it is worth a look. I got this notice in my inbox early Tuesday morning:
Immediately following, there was an interesting discussion on SemiWiki… Read More
There is a lot of talk about where Intel went wrong, the latest is missing AI, but people seem to forget one of the more defining blunders in the history of Intel. In April of 2012 Kirk Skaugen, the new general manager of Intel’s client PC group, moderated a Q&A with Mark Bohr, a 33+ year Intel fellow, and Brad Heaney, the Ivy Bridge… Read More
One of the most enduring threads in the SemiWiki forum is What would you do if you are the Intel CEO? There are currently 128 responses and more than 45,000 views. It was originally posted March 13th, 2015, after Brain Krzanich was given the CEO position. A different time for sure but an interesting read and the responses keep on coming.… Read More
-Gordon Moore’s passing reminds us of how far we have come
-One of many pioneers of chip industry-but most remembered
-The most exponential & ubiquitous industry of all times
-“No exponential is forever”- Gordon Moore was an exponential
He will be remembered most for his observation… Read More
I met Andy Grove on a sunny day in New York City in 1987. He was dashing to press interviews for his just-off-the-presses management book, “One on One with Andy Grove.” I was a freshly badged member of the press working for IEEE Spectrum, a year or so out of college, still toting my college backpack. Little did I know that that would be … Read More
Last week, Intel announced its second-quarter financial results which easily beat the analysts’ consensus expectations by a handsome margin. Yet the stock price plummeted by over 16% right after the earnings call with management. Seven analysts downgraded the stock to a sell and the common theme on all the downgrades was that… Read More
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
Wikipedia … “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a non-linear system can result in large differences in a later state”. In other words, a butterfly bats its wings in Argentina and the path of an immense tornado in Oklahoma is changed some… Read More
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who had left Fairchild earlier that year. They immediately hired Andy Grove. Noyce, Moore and Grove were a study in contrasts. I had various dealings over the years with Noyce and Grove, but have met Moore only twice. They… Read More
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Noyce and the rest of the traitorous eight left Shockley without a clue as to what they would do next. They believed in semiconductors and knew that they were the very best semiconductor guys in the world. Their hope was to find a company who would hire them en masse. After some false… Read More
