Electronic Business articles from June 2005

Electronic Business archives from June 2005

A challenging environment: what going green and global means.(Editorial)
June 1, 2005... In the long run, doing the right thing is almost always in a company's best economic interest. This realization has clearly taken hold within the electronics industry. Call it enlightened self-interest, but most executive managers understand...

Environmental differentiation: what regions with low labor costs need for design success.(Commentary)
June 1, 2005... Remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Maslow, a psychologist, ranked the needs human beings seek to meet. At the bottom are the basics--food and shelter. As these are met, people seek to meet higher-order needs, such as love or...

Repairing a damaged reputation: how new CEOs can recover from a corporate scandal.(MANAGEMENT)
June 1, 2005... CEOs who take the reins of leadership at companies rocked by scandal face an uphill battle on a variety of fronts. To restore a tarnished reputation, they need to regain the confidence of multiple groups--investors, customers, employees,...

Digital TV chips: picture still fuzzy: Intel's recent moves illustrate the fast-moving, immature market.(MARKETS)
June 1, 2005... Intel spent 2004 entering--and exiting--the liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) technology for digital television (DTV) displays arena. So what does it have in mind, now that it has acquired an Israeli company that has developed video processing...

What's delaying expansion? Start with high oil prices, and go from there.(ECONOMIC OUTLOOK)
June 1, 2005... Here's the short-term assessment of what happened in the semiconductor market earlier this year (2005). Shipments dipped 1.5 percent, seasonally adjusted, from February to March. Higher sales of handset components did not fully offset lower...

VC investing takes a turn for the better: entrepreneurs benefit from a slight upswing in 2004.(FINANCE)
June 1, 2005... Just as the economy seems to be finally shedding the effects of the bust, so too is the venture capital industry. For the first time since 2000, the height of the throw-money-at-anything-that-moves madness, VC investment increased, from $18.9...

Do the right thing--the right way: corporate ethics policies must accommodate multiple cultures.(GLOBALIZATION)
June 1, 2005... Imagine being the guy charged with developing, implementing and overseeing Tyco International's guide to ethical conduct in the wake of the Dennis Kozlowski scandal. Eric Pillmore is that guy. Tyco CEO Edward Breen named Pillmore to head...

Surveillance mini-boom: with cameras moving from analog to digital, stand by for more-futuristic applications.(Semiconductors)
June 1, 2005... In what seems to be an increasingly chaotic world of terrorism and crime, the video surveillance market has been on the upswing. More cameras are getting installed in parking lots, city streets and airports. And existing cameras are getting...

MP3 leaders face off: PortalPlayer and SigmaTel are taking aim at new markets--including each others'.(CONSUMER ELECTRONICS)
June 1, 2005... After dominating their respective markets and seeing their sales multiply during the past year, the top two suppliers of MP3 music player semiconductors are introducing new chips targeting each other's markets. PortalPlayer, the leading...

Discounting the future: Cadence has plans to renew industry revenues.(Electronic Design Automation)
June 1, 2005... As EDA's growth continues to lag both the semiconductor industry and the rest of the software industry, it becomes clearer that the EDA vendors bungled in making the transition to a subscription licensing model. However, at least one industry...

The "greening" of the supply chain: suppliers, distributors and customers struggle with RoHS compliance.(Supply Chain Management)(Restriction of Hazardous Substances)
June 1, 2005... It's hard not to get a little panicky over Europe's impending Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). Consider the scope: The world's largest catalog distributor of electronic components, NewarkInOne, stocks more than 165,000 parts that...

Have the foundries caught up? No longer technical laggards, foundries close in on the leading edge.(Capital Equipment)
June 1, 2005... For a long time, foundries were third-string players in the chip business, pumping out cheap, trailing-edge chips in high volume for clock radios and such. But as we entered the submicron era of semiconductors, that began to change--the rise in...

Crunching down on contracts: forget the perk-laden CEO contracts of the past. Today's employment agreements are less about guaranteed bonuses and more about tying CEO compensation to performance.(CEO PAY)
June 1, 2005... Like many in the electronics industry who have served as CEO of multiple companies, Rajeev Madhavan runs hot and cold on the subject of employment contracts. During one of his CEO posts a couple of years back, Madhavan neglected to put a...

Top 40 executives: electronic business' highest-paid executives 2004.(CEO PAY)
June 1, 2005... METHODOLOGY ELECTRONIC BUSINESS' Top 40 Highest Paid Executives ranking is based on information gathered from the companies' DEF-14A or proxy statements. Only companies that derived at least 50 percent of their total revenue from...

Productivity versus yield: will design automation be practical at 45 nanometers and beyond?(Electronic design automation.)(Column)
June 1, 2005... IT'S ALL ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY versus yield. Every discussion of the future of EDA boils down to the same conundrum: how to manufacture efficient chips without the need for time-wasting engineering tweaks. To make designers more productive as they...

How green is the valley? Semiconductor firms are protecting their hard-won reputation of being green.(ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES)(Column)
June 1, 2005... In the mid-1980s, the semiconductor industry became the scapegoat for 20 years of environmental ignorance inside the high-tech sector. Residents of Santa Clara County, which encompasses most of California's Silicon Valley, brought a civil suit...