Electronic Business articles from March 2006

Electronic Business archives from March 2006

Should the U.S. go fabless? Manufacturing "lessons learned" from New England.(Editor's Note)
March 1, 2006... Two features in this issue--"Beyond the China Mystique" and "It's tough to be green"--hit close to home. Companies prominent in each story, Lucent and Celestica, both have large empty plants within 20 miles of my hometown in Massachusetts....

Test industry needs to shift gears: open standards may lower test equipment costs.(Commentary)
March 1, 2006... Cyclical demand, downward pricing pressures and progressive technology are nothing new to semiconductor manufacturers or their equipment suppliers. What is new are the fundamental--and not incremental--structural changes that are accelerating...

Electronic materials get 'smarter': an old material used in new ways ... and for new uses.(TECHNOLOGY)
March 1, 2006... Sixty years ago, if you'd told scientists that the material that would drive revolutionary advancements in electronics was basically sand, they'd have laughed. But the fact is that without silicon, ceramics, plastics and a bunch of other stuff,...

Europe at a crossroads: advancing markets can't offset receding manufacturing.(MARKET)
March 1, 2006... Judging by some key electronics markets, the enlarged 25-member European Union seems fairly robust. Take the information technology and telecommunications (ITC) sector, which grew 2.9 percent, to $745 billion, in 2005. Driving the market are...

Venture investments flat in 2005: the money's there, but few VCs bet on first-timers.(FINANCE)
March 1, 2006... Google's initial public offering in 2005 didn't have the effect on the IPO environment that many had hoped for. Venture investors--weary of the IPO dry spell--were optimistic that Google would reinvigorate the market. Instead, it only...

Unveiling Avago: free from Agilent's shadow, a low-profile chip maker seeks its own identity.(Avago Technologies)(Company overview)
March 1, 2006... Pop quiz: Which $1.6 billion company has been in the semiconductor business for 40 years, ranks as the industry's sixth-largest fabless chip producer and shifted its corporate domicile from the United States to Singapore? If you couldn't...

Move over, China: after years of seeing investors opt for China, India is pursuing several new chip-making projects.(Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co)
March 1, 2006... Deven Verma has seen big changes recently in investors' and Indian government officials' responses to his plans to build one of India's first modern semiconductor fabrication plants. "Eight months ago, the reception was lukewarm; today it...

There are five critical inventories? Why each of these inventories can make a difference to your business.(Supply Chain Management)
March 1, 2006... In a just-in-time or build-to-order environment, the only inventory that counts is the inventory that's in the right place when you need it. In the electronics industry, that usually translates into two "critical" inventories: parts in the...

Pirates, beware: EDA goes on the offensive against software piracy.(Software)
March 1, 2006... Could your company be pirating software unknowingly? It's certainly possible, if you take into account that some EDA software piracy is unintentionally committed by chip designing customers that lack the best license management practices or...

Many analysts optimistic--again: growth predicted for all major capital equipment market segments.(Capital Equipment)
March 1, 2006... Semiconductor capital equipment industry analysts are quarterly optimistic about the outlook for 2006 and the short term beyond, based on market forecasts for this year ranging from flat to 12 percent growth. The general consensus among...

Chip sets may give AMD the edge: Intel's chip set shortage may be giving AMD an edge against its much larger rival in the processor space.(SEMICONDUCTORS)
March 1, 2006... For the past year, Intel has been pushing the message that there's more to a PC than just the processor. Indeed, many chips go into creating a system that offers all the features an individual user may want. Intel calls this approach of...

Passage to India: will India become the EDA incubator?(Electronic Design Automation)
March 1, 2006... Given the close ties of EDA to the U.S.-dominated semiconductor industry, it's not surprising that the major EDA vendors, and most of the minor ones as well, are headquartered in the United States. However, the American character of EDA may not...

It's tough to be green.(COMPLIANCE)(Cover Story)
March 1, 2006... If you've determined that your products must adhere to Europe's Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) but you're not quite there yet, you have two choices: pray for an extension on the July 1, 2006, compliance deadline or break out your...

Real time teams: companies cope with the demands of globalization, miniaturization and shrinking market windows.(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY)
March 1, 2006... If you want to learn how to get your products to market faster, you might want to take a lesson from Venkat Ghanta of Cisco Systems. Ghanta, Cisco's senior manager for physical design engineering, improved his department's productivity by...

Oil volatility poses threat to electronics sales worldwide: higher oil prices threaten demand for electronics products.(MACROECONOMICS)
March 1, 2006... The year opened with three key economic measures moving counter to xpectations. Two of these surprises were bad news and one was good news for the strength of the 2006 economic environment in the United States. It turns out that all three...