Electronic Business articles from May 2004

Electronic Business archives from May 2004

Ballmer, butthead and McNealy: strange bedfellows? Customers don't think so.(Editor's Note)
May 1, 2004... When Silicon Valley gets rain every day and Seattle has perpetual sunshine, that's when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft will bury the hatchet. Or so I used to think. Please excuse me, then, for initially wondering if their peace treaty,...

Missing in action.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... Bill Roberts' feature on offshoring ("The Perfect Storm Brews Offshore," March 2004, page 46) was excellent. But he failed to tie back the significance of one point that Jaswinder Ahuja of Cadence made early in the article. Although speaking...

Biometrics bingo.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... I read your feature article on biometrics ("A Market in Search of an Identity," January 2004, page 58) with great interest. Generally the image of fingerprint identification in Japan has been rather negative--until NTT DoCoMo started to sell...

We were never careful about money.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... In the April 2004 article "Currency Crisis: Yuan or Yawn" (page 20), the spelling of the Chinese currency name is mangled. It's renminbi, which means "people's currency." Donald Tang Broadcom San Jose, Calif.

Clarification.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
May 1, 2004... After our April 2004 story on structured ASICs ("Structured ASICs Gaining Momentum," page 32) went to press, Chip Express changed its name to ChipX. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR EB welcomes comments from readers. We, reserve the right to edit...

How open is open? IBM looks to expand the market for Power processors.(Chip Advisor)
May 1, 2004... IBM's POWER architecture brought RISC (reduced instruction-set computing) technology to the market in 1990. IBM's Power4+, with two processors per chip, is the most effective server processor on the market today; in February 2004, a...

Consumer behavior infects the IC market: it's not just processor cycles that are getting faster.(Commentary)(Integrated circuits)
May 1, 2004... As the semiconductor industry emerges from the frightful downturn, we hope to see new business models emerge, models based on the way the market evolved when business was bad. Why are new business models necessary? Because we've moved into what...

An offshore test of IP rights.(Litigation)(intellectual property)
May 1, 2004... When sales of an Analog Devices semiconductor for electricity meters plunged in India, executives smelled something fishy. Almost overnight, the company's market share for this class of product fell from 80 percent to 20 percent. The...

Portable memory, without the baggage: startup Cornice makes headway with an embedded one-inch disk drive.(Profile)(Company Profile)
May 1, 2004... New disk drive companies are rare, and successful new disk drive companies are even rarer. But startup Cornice has targeted a market niche that just might blossom. Founded in August 2000 by Kevin Magenis, former vice president of...

Premium-priced options are not right for everyone: IBM-style plan is best suited to companies with the most stable stock prices.(Finance)
May 1, 2004... IBM received well-deserved kudos from analysts and shareholder groups earlier this year when it announced that its most senior executives would begin to receive premium-priced stock options--options they can only cash in if IBM's share price...

Americans aren't alone in moving to India: Europeans and Koreans are designing and manufacturing there too.(Management)
May 1, 2004... STMicroelectronics set up its first offshore design center in a far-flung, exotic locale--Boston. It was the 1970s, and the Geneva-based company was just beginning to expand beyond its home base in France and Italy. "We first went to the...

Where the action is: the North American market dominates 2004 electronics sales gains.(Economic Outlook)
May 1, 2004... ELECTRONIC BUSINESS expects substantial sales gains this year in virtually all electronics markets, much as other public forecasts and private corporate plans do. Where are the additional electronics sales coming from that these forecasts...

That long, lonesome last mile: new standard may help Ethernet make the leap.(Connectivity)
May 1, 2004... Is Ethernet the right network technology for the "last mile"--the distance between a business or a residence and the place where it joins up with other network traffic? Theoretically, it makes sense to use it, but it will probably take a while...

Kester--changing to meet the future of electronics.
May 1, 2004... For over a century, Kester, a Chicago solder company has been delivering superior products and technology to customers worldwide. Before the latest 90 nm] wafer technology hit, before the electronics boom, before the industrial age, there was...

Offshoring creates U.S. jobs--for economists: researchers rush to fill the void of data on effects of outsourcing.(Offshoring)
May 1, 2004... Given the dearth of hard data and the rising political heat on offshoring, trade organizations and consultancies have rushed to fill the vacuum with their own studies. In just one week in late March, the American Electronics Association...

The sun keeps shining.(Business Barometer)(Illustration)
May 1, 2004... This month's polling of purchasing managers still shows signs of life for the electronics industry. Despite speculation of rising inflation and a volatile stock market, more than a third expect overall business conditions to improve in the next...

Everything but the kitchen sink: chip makers add more new features into today's handsets.(Semiconductors)
May 1, 2004... If you take a look at early cellular phone models today, they seem ridiculously large--more like a dumbbell than today's sleek, streamlined phones that can fit into a small shirt pocket. Like much of today's electronics, the chips inside them...

Breaking the silicon bronco: Motorola's Buster Group works in isolation to find bugs before customers do.(Verification)
May 1, 2004... Imagine this classified ad: "Wanted: engineers who like to break things and who as children took alarm clocks apart. Must be as curious as Columbo and methodical as a CSI tech. Apply to the Buster Group, c/o Motorola." It sounds like a job...

The sleeping giant stirs: IBM's free EDA tools may change the competitive landscape.(Electronic Design Automation)
May 1, 2004... Will IBM make another run at the EDA tools market? Its been 10 years since it last tried, and failed, to compete in that market, but there are indications that the company might be giving it a second thought. IBM has some of the best EDA...

Thwarting counterfeiters: UL and customs officials work to keep bogus goods out of the supply chain.(Supply Chain Management)(Underwriters Laboratories)
May 1, 2004... There's little question that the migration of electronics manufacturing to Asia has heightened the industry's concerns over counterfeiting. China, in particular, is known for its lax enforcement of intellectual property, patent and trademark...

The state of the industry: distributors must continue to change to meet market challenges.(Distribution)
May 1, 2004... For more than five decades, electronics distributors have struggled to keep pace with technology and their customers' needs. Although rumors of their extinction at the hands of the Internet were greatly exaggerated, distributors--some of which,...

Tariffs, standards and IP theft--oh my! Business in China is proving problematic.(Capital Equipment)(intellectual property)
May 1, 2004... The Chinese market for semiconductors and chip process, test and assembly equipment has been emerging for years. But it was only in the last few, as the industry struggled with the downturn, that China became not only an important market but...

Going light on semiconductors: Philips lessens its capital investment, but keeps its chip division in house.(Profile)
May 1, 2004... Royal Philips Electronics had a secret weapon as it raced to introduce the world's first consumer DVD recorder in 2001. For months, its consumer electronics engineers worked hand in hand with chip designers from its semiconductor business to...

Three to grow on: these up-and-coming semiconductor companies are targeting three key areas of growth with intriguing technology.(Start Ups)
May 1, 2004... It's not immediately intuitive, but startups and slumps have a symbiotic relationship, especially in the semiconductor business. Think about it. It takes a couple of years to get chips designed, tested and perfected. What better time to do that...

Double trouble: no company wants to be the last one holding the industry's hot potato: excess inventory.(Supply Chain Strategies)
May 1, 2004... THE EXECUTIVES BELOW, from different vantage points along the supply chain, illustrate how perplexed people remain from the double and triple booking of the last boom, which, according to market research firm iSuppli, caused an aggregate...

In search of the Swiss army phone: what happens when the line blurs between devices for mobile professional and consumers?(Venture Pulse)
May 1, 2004... The explosion of new portable electronics devices in the past year is quickly blurring the line between "mobile professional" and "consumer electronics." When your cell phone can handle e-mail as well as play videos, which is it? A few...