More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel

More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
by John East on 09-16-2019 at 6:00 am

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


Actel TI and TSMC Foundry Woes

Actel TI and TSMC Foundry Woes
by John East on 09-09-2019 at 6:00 am

TSMC was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang.  At about the same time, I was wrestling with the question of whether or not to join Actel.  Morris had been a top executive at Texas Instruments during the period when TI took ownership of the TTL market.  (See my week #8.  Texas Instruments and the TTL Wars)  I have to admit that when I first … Read More


From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)

From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)
by John East on 09-02-2019 at 6:00 am

By the late 80s it had become clear to me that the Japanese were right.  Memories,  Microprocessors,  and Gate Arrays (As well as ASICs) were what customers wanted then.  “Building blocks of ever-increasing complexity” was obsolete.  What next?  Should I try to become an overnight networking expert?  Maybe a DSP expert?  Pretty… Read More


Intel,  Motorola, and the IBM PC

Intel,  Motorola, and the IBM PC
by John East on 08-05-2019 at 6:00 am

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


TI: Semiconductor Industry History of Innovation

TI: Semiconductor Industry History of Innovation
by Daniel Nenni on 07-06-2018 at 7:00 am

This is the fifth in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”

Texas Instruments is a remarkable company founded by remarkable people. And Eric Jonsson was one of the most remarkable visionaries of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century. He was a renaissance man who created an industry and a fortune by following the needs… Read More