Electronic Business back issues from May 2004:
Ballmer, butthead and McNealy: strange bedfellows? Customers don't think so.(Editor's Note)
May 01, 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, announced April 2, was a day-late April Fools' hoax ...
Missing in action.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 01, 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 with a unified voice is clearly important for ...
Biometrics bingo.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 01, 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 its F505i cellular phone in 2003, with the total ...
We were never careful about money.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 01, 2004; ... In the April 2004 article "Currency Crisis: Yuan or Yawn" (page 20), the spelling of the Chinese currency name is ...
Clarification.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
May 01, 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 ...
How open is open? IBM looks to expand the market for Power processors.(Chip Advisor)
May 01, 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 32-processor IBM eServer pSeries 690 Model ...
Consumer behavior infects the IC market: it's not just processor cycles that are getting faster.(Commentary)(Integrated circuits)
May 01, 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 we call the consumer era for ICs, an era that ...
An offshore test of IP rights.(Litigation)(intellectual property)
May 01, 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 problem: Lower-priced counterfeit chips ...
Portable memory, without the baggage: startup Cornice makes headway with an embedded one-inch disk drive.(Profile)(Company Profile)
May 01, 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 engineering at Maxtor, and Curt Bruner, former ...
Premium-priced options are not right for everyone: IBM-style plan is best suited to companies with the most stable stock prices.(Finance)
May 01, 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 rises by at least 10 percent. Is this approach a ...
Americans aren't alone in moving to India: Europeans and Koreans are designing and manufacturing there too.(Management)
May 01, 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 U.S. and then to Germany, so we could ...
Where the action is: the North American market dominates 2004 electronics sales gains.(Economic Outlook)
May 01, 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 anticipate? Most component sales managers would say ...
That long, lonesome last mile: new standard may help Ethernet make the leap.(Connectivity)
May 01, 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 to catch on, especially in the United States. ...
Kester--changing to meet the future of electronics.
May 01, 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 solder--a magical material that allowed the ...
Offshoring creates U.S. jobs--for economists: researchers rush to fill the void of data on effects of outsourcing.(Offshoring)
May 01, 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 (AeA), the Information Technology ...
The sun keeps shining.(Business Barometer)(Illustration)
May 01, 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 30 days. As companies look to ...
Everything but the kitchen sink: chip makers add more new features into today's handsets.(Semiconductors)
May 01, 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 have shrunk, following Moore's Law, bringing ...
Breaking the silicon bronco: Motorola's Buster Group works in isolation to find bugs before customers do.(Verification)
May 01, 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 for Dennis the Menace--getting paid to ...
The sleeping giant stirs: IBM's free EDA tools may change the competitive landscape.(Electronic Design Automation)
May 01, 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 tools in the industry, according to ...
Thwarting counterfeiters: UL and customs officials work to keep bogus goods out of the supply chain.(Supply Chain Management)(Underwriters Laboratories)
May 01, 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 laws. Although legal action has been the main ...
The state of the industry: distributors must continue to change to meet market challenges.(Distribution)
May 01, 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, tongue in cheek, have adopted the label ...
Tariffs, standards and IP theft--oh my! Business in China is proving problematic.(Capital Equipment)(intellectual property)
May 01, 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 also increasingly a competitor. Both the ...
Going light on semiconductors: Philips lessens its capital investment, but keeps its chip division in house.(Profile)
May 01, 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 bring the revolutionary optical-recording ...
Three to grow on: these up-and-coming semiconductor companies are targeting three key areas of growth with intriguing technology.(Start Ups)
May 01, 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 than when engineers are plentiful, real ...
Double trouble: no company wants to be the last one holding the industry's hot potato: excess inventory.(Supply Chain Strategies)
May 01, 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 inventory write-off of more than $30 billion in the ...
In search of the Swiss army phone: what happens when the line blurs between devices for mobile professional and consumers?(Venture Pulse)
May 01, 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 years ago, there was a lot of press about ...