Electronic Business articles from December 2005

Electronic Business archives from December 2005

May I have the envelope, please? This year's designee takes an also-ran to new heights.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Hector Ruiz)(Editorial)
December 1, 2005... The dangers in choosing a "CEO of the Year" is either elevating an individual who doesn't deserve such recognition or overlooking someone who merits it more. With AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, we feel confident that we avoided any such miscues. If...

The road to meaningful change: three ways you can lessen engineers' resistance to progress.
December 1, 2005... The only constant is constant change. In the electronics industry, it's an adage that hits close to home, especially given consumers' insatiable appetite for new products. Isn't it ironic, then, that the engineering communities that are...

Is your startup worthy? Seed cash is harder to come by than ever before.(FINANCE)
December 1, 2005... One of the most difficult tasks l in getting a startup off the ground can be convincing a venture capitalist to back your idea with a cash infusion. According to many in the chip business, that step is more difficult today than it has ever...

What 2006 holds for electronics: a look at the global economic environment for the industry.(ECONOMIC OUTLOOK)
December 1, 2005... Last month, in commemoration of EB's 30th anniversary, we prognosticate 30 years ahead--an unusual task, in that analysts tend to believe that the potential for cataclysmic events makes predictions beyond 20 years shaky. In this article, we...

Qualcomm hedges its bets: a new technology acquisition may protect tomorrow's revenue stream.(PROFILE)
December 1, 2005... Qualcomm was built on the basis of a wireless communications technology known as CDMA (code division multiple access). Today CDMA (see "Riding the Big Wireless Wave," July 1, 2003, page 54) plays a strong--although not dominant--role in...

Sarbanes-Oxley off balance; real problems found, but the cost is too great.
December 1, 2005... With the first full year of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley finally over for most large public companies, corporate America is taking a deep breath and tallying up the cost/benefit ratio of the law and its implementation so far. Although most...

Breathing new life into legacy systems with response management.(transaction systems are the integral part of production )
December 1, 2005... If you're like most OEMs or contract manufacturers, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is your biggest application investment year after year. This is understandable, because these transaction-oriented systems serve as the...

Global invitation: the electronics industry has become the object of the world's affections.(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2005... In the third quarter of 2005, no fewer than four government entities--two states and two countries--launched programs to assiduously persuade electronics companies to set up shop within their borders (see the box, "Moving In and Moving Up")....

Unlocking the IP vault: startup retools in-house chip technology for the mass market.(INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY)
December 1, 2005... For decades chip companies have been sitting on a wealth of intellectual property they have developed for their own use. But now that the commercial market for semiconductor IP has hit more than $1 billion, chip companies are looking for new...

Universal dreaming? A one-size-fits-all memory chip is proving elusive.(Samsung Group's Dynamic random access memory)
December 1, 2005... For years the semiconductor industry has searched in vain for a "universal" memory technology that can retain data without a constant power supply and is fast, cheap and dense enough to replace the multiple technologies such as DRAM, SRAM and...

Open debatable: why open source EDA isn't a big deal.(Electronic Design Automation)
December 1, 2005... The open source movement may be earth-shaking for the software industry, but it's been little more than a tremor for the EDA segment. And that's not likely to change, because the two key psychological motivators for programmer participation in...

A new spin on an old problem: can't get old ICs? Send in the clones.(Lantronix Inc. on microcontrollers clone)
December 1, 2005... When Advanced Micro Devices stopped making its Am186 and Am188 chips, in early 2002, it left networking equipment maker Lantronix high and dry. Lantronix makes a family of serial ports that have used AMD's 186ES microcontroller since the late...

ATE industry streamlines to survive: operational focus is now on reducing costs and increasing responsiveness.(Capital Equipment)
December 1, 2005... Automatic test equipment (ATE) manufacturers Advantest, Agilent, Credence and Teradyne have been battling for market share in a highly competitive, yet fairly flat and stagnant, market since 2001. Now that the market is maturing, most of these...

Can software show you the shop floor? Manufacturing intelligence promises OEMs visibility--and control.(Software)
December 1, 2005... One foggy day, a balloon pilot loses his way and lands in a field to ask for directions. "Where am I?" he shouts at a man wielding a hoe. "You're in a balloon, you damn fool!" the astounded farmer bellows back. The moral? It's possible to be...

Quiet power: by focusing on fundamentals, Hector Ruiz has put AMD on the right track.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s )(Biography)
December 1, 2005... HECTOR RUIZ is no stranger to challenge, but when he took over as CEO of Advanced Micro Devices from Jerry Sanders, in 2002, Ruiz signed up for the trifecta: a first-time CEO taking over from a founding entrepreneur and taking on the most...

Virtual versus vertical: how will DFM change the foundries?(FOUNDRIES)
December 1, 2005... There's no question that the pure-play foundry has proven to be one of the most successful innovations in the semiconductor industry. Twenty years ago, these independent foundries didn't exist; in 2004 the combined revenues of the four largest...

The future that never was: seven products that could have changed the industry but didn't.
December 1, 2005... The electronics industry is in a constant state of growth and evolution. At each stage of its development, there have been key products, such as the IBM 360, the 8086 CPU and the cell phone, that have defined the industry's direction for a...