Yarns

23 years ago, five years before Elon’s first successful launch, there was Burt Rutan. Rutan was the man behind Spaceship One, the first private craft to go into space. In 2005 he made a guest appearance at IDF  to tell delegates that taking risks is good. Rutan described what he saw as the cautious approach to technology development adopted by ...

Intel’s efforts in the phone business did not end well, but 21 years ago, the company’s mobile targets were ambitious: ‘The next decade will see the way people interact with computers and electronic devices ‘humanised’, thanks to widely available massive processing power and a variety of new technologies,’ began an EW story in 2005, ‘at least that’s Intel’s vision of ...

24 years ago, the need for Arm and the chipless community to move further into systems engineering was flagged up by analysts Future Horizons A story in EW in 2002 started: ‘The chipless business model – companies which develop and sell semiconductor IP – may have run out of steam, according to a report from analysts Future Horizons. “Supplying a ...

23 years ago, fostering good relations with China looked like a good idea, ‘A new initiative intended to foster Anglo-Chinese business joint ventures was recently launched in the UK,’ reported EW in 2003, ‘the first ever innovation park specifically intended to encourage Chinese companies to set up operations in Europe was opened in Cambridge in September.” ‘ ‘The China-UK Innovation ...

Electron projection lithography (EPL) is moving out of the R&D lab and into manufacturing evaluation sites, according to chip consortiums International Sematechr and Selete. That’s the word from the 2003  annual workshop on the technology, held in Cambridge and sponsored by Austin-based Sematech and Tsukuba, Japan-based Selete. Forum participants revised the technology’s top ten technical challenges, which include a mix ...

In 2008 the world was in crisis as bankers’ excesses threatened to destroy the financial system. “We are in one of the most difficult crises the industry has faced,” Alain Dutheil, CEO of ST-NXP Wireless and chairman of the European R&D programme AENEAS, told the European Nanoelectronics Forum 2008 in Paris this morning. “Visibility is poor. R&D is more than ...

The health of the European microelectronics industry has never been better. This was the message from Monte Carlo  at the 2006 annual forum of MEDEA+, the pan-European microelectronics initiative. In many key areas, Europe and the US are fighting it out for supremacy, and lithography is probably the most important of these. “We are the first company in the world ...

In the early days of telephony, the telephone operating companies found that advertising  suggestions for what to do with telephones was an effective way of recruiting new customers: Moral: Utility resides in the eye of the beholder

At a board meeting of Fairchild Semiconductor on October 15th 1968, company president Les Hogan stated: “Almost all of our qualifications on MIL devices have lapsed, and we are thus excluded from shipping to the high-priced and profitable military market unless we continue to lie. There are many reasons for not doing so.” “First, it is fraud and, if exposed, ...

At a 2004 meeting, SMIC’s CEO described the  easy access to Western technology the company then enjoyed. The story runs: ‘SMIC, the Chinese foundry which raised $1.6bn in its initial public offer earlier this year, has come to a special arrangement with the US to circumvent the provisions of the international Wassernaar Agreement which limits mainland China to having semiconductor ...