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Four years ago, a VC friend of mine was invited to a get together with a prominent Hedge Fund Manager from the Midwest. The meeting was an arrangement between fellow Harvard Grads. The Fund Manager was looking to make investments in the valley, to diversify away from his heavily weighted financial positions. Though, not recognized at the time, the Manager had a few ...

AVNET released their 15^th Xfest this year, a couple of months ago. It was here in Germany last week. It was a well organized ...

Well, you can wear flowers in your hair if you like, but it is a bit sixties. However, here are some things that I do recommend that you be sure to do.

Some of these recommendations require you to find a given numbered pier. The Ferry Building at the end of Market Street is effectively pier 0. Odd numbers go north (including pier 1½ ). Even numbered piers go south (although many are missing). I used ...

The world semiconductor market declined 2.2% in 1Q 2012 from 4Q 2011, according to WSTS. The market ended 2011 on a down slide, with 4Q 2011 down 7.7% from 3Q 2011. The year 2011 semiconductor market was up only 0.4%.

Three major events contributed to the weakness in 2011:

1. March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan disrupted electronics and semiconductor production.
2. Floods in Thailand

...

You can see a lot just by looking – as Yogi Berra was quoted as saying. The past two weeks we have seen quite a bit that adds intrigue to the true nature of Qualcomm’s 28nm product shortage and how the effects will ripple through the mobile industry for the second half of 2012. Samsung’s bold announcement of their Galaxy S III smartphones was a message to the world that they intended to leap frog Apple in terms of ...

Last week, at the same time I was writing a blog about PHY IP market, claiming that this market was shaken, several events happened – not on the pure business side, but on the legal side. This means that I will have to carefully check before using each word of this blog!



If you remember, the blog conclusion was focusing on V Semiconductor, a start-up created in ...

In one of Portlandia's TV program sketches, there is a funny interchange between a carrier salesperson and Fred Armisen (of SNL fame) who was trying to buy a phone. One chuckle line was a statement by the seller that the phone was free after paying for it and that there was a one-time annual fee. With this anecdote as a mental backdrop, the question for making the case for a new ...

It's been 34 years since I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Electrical Engineering so I was curious about what has changed in quantum physics since then. Alastair Rae is the UK-based author who wrote the book - Quantum Physics: A Beginner's Guide. I read this on my ...

How could I talk about the various Interface protocols (PCIe, USB, MIPI, DDRn…) from an IP perspective and miss the PHY IP! Especially these days, where the PHY IP market has been seriously shaken, as we will see in this post, and will probably continue to be shaken… but we will have to wait and look at the M&A news during the next few weeks or so.

Before looking at these business related movements, doing some quick evangelization about what exactly is a PHY. The ...