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Verigy and LTX-Credence merge

Heervee — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:47:31 +0000

Mark LaPedus, 11/18/2010 3:45 AM EST

SAN JOSE, Calif. – In a major move in the ATE sector, Verigy Inc. has acquired rival LTX-Credence Corp.

The combined company will be called Verigy. Verigy itself was formerly part of Agilent Technologies Inc. Agilent spun-out the ATE unit several years ago, thereby forming Verigy. Several years ago, LTX Corp. bought ATE rival Credence Systems Corp., forming LTX-Credence.

With LTX-Credence, Verigy expands its efforts in the logic, mixed-signal and analog ATE markets. Verigy is strong in logic and memory test. In logic, it has a large presence in the subcontractor community. In memory, Verigy’s customers include Samsung, SanDisk and others.

LTX-Credence is strong in mixed-signal, and, to some degree, logic. LTX-Credence’s largest customer is Texas Instruments Inc. The combined entities will compete against Advantest, Teradyne, among others.

Meanwhile, under the terms, Verigy president and COO, Jorge Titinger, and LTX-Credence president and CEO, David Tacelli, will serve as co-CEOs of the new company, which will be headquartered in Singapore with U.S. headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

Verigy chairman and CEO, Keith Barnes, will continue as the chairman of the board of directors, which will be comprised of 12 members, seven designated by Verigy and five by LTX-Credence.

Furthermore, to facilitate the leadership change, Keith Barnes will transition from Verigy CEO to Verigy chairman of the board of directors as of Dec. 31, 2010, and Jorge Titinger will be promoted to Verigy CEO and president.

“The two companies share a long legacy of innovation in test solutions that meet customers’ technology needs and enable them to maximize profitability and competitiveness,” said Barnes in a statement. “By joining forces, we expect the combined scale to strengthen our global presence, realize significant synergies and provide substantial benefits to our customers, shareholders and employees.”

Under the terms of the agreement, the transaction will either be effected through a reorganization where Verigy and LTX-Credence would be wholly owned subsidiaries of Holdco, a newly created subsidiary, or through a merger where LTX-Credence would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Verigy.

LTX-Credence shareholders will receive a fixed exchange ratio of 0.96 shares of Verigy stock or Holdco stock for each share of LTX-Credence stock. Upon closing, Verigy or Holdco, as applicable, will issue approximately 49 million shares on a fully diluted basis to complete the transaction. At that time, Verigy and LTX-Credence shareholders will own approximately 56 percent and 44 percent, respectively, of the combined company.

The combined company also expects to realize substantial synergies within one year of the close of the deal, with annual cost savings expected to reach at least $25 million, primarily from increased efficiencies in manufacturing and reduced operating expenses.

The transaction is subject to the approval of shareholders from both companies as well as other customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The companies expect the transaction to close in the first half of calendar 2011.

Shares of the combined company will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “VRGY.” Morgan Stanley acted as financial advisor and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal counsel to Verigy. J.P. Morgan acted as financial advisor and WilmerHale acted as legal counsel to LTX-Credence.

Verigy also announced today its board of directors has authorized an odd lot program that will result in the purchase of approximately 2.3 million shares, or 4 percent of Verigy’s current outstanding shares, from shareholders holding less than 100 shares of the combined company following the transaction.

This is expected to simplify the combined company’s capital structure. In addition, Verigy’s board has authorized an annual stock repurchase program of up to 10 percent of the Verigy’s current outstanding shares, effective for approximately 12 months following the transaction. The repurchases are expected to be funded from available cash and short-term investments. The odd lot repurchase and stock repurchase program are both subject to shareholder approval at Verigy’s next shareholder meeting.

Verigy presentation here: cnsmprod_014476

source eetimes

Sally Hogshead – How to Fascinate

Heervee — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:04:20 +0000

In today’s world of 9-second attention spans, our introductions mean more-than-ever before. Sally Hogshead reveals the seven triggers of fascination and how to get others to fall in love with your ideas, instantly. Thank you to Definition 6 for providing in-kind video editing services for TEDxAtlanta.

Extending Moore’s Law: Expitaxial graphene shows promise for replacing silicon in electronics

Heervee — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:19:01 +0000

(PhysOrg.com) — Move over silicon. There’s a new electronic material in town, and it goes fast. That material, the focus of the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, is graphene — a fancy name for extremely thin layers of ordinary carbon atoms arranged in a “chicken-wire” lattice. These layers, sometimes just a single atom thick, conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, very little heat generation — and less power consumption than silicon.

With silicon device fabrication approaching its physical limits, many researchers believe graphene can provide a new platform material that would allow the semiconductor industry to continue its march toward ever-smaller and faster electronic devices — progress described in Moore’s Law. Though graphene will likely never replace silicon for everyday electronic applications, it could take over as the material of choice for high-performance devices.

And graphene could ultimately spawn a new generation of devices designed to take advantage of its unique properties.

Since 2001, Georgia Tech has become a world leader in developing epitaxial graphene, a specific type of graphene that can be grown on large wafers and patterned for use in electronics manufacturing. In a recent paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Georgia Tech researchers reported fabricating an array of 10,000 top-gated transistors on a 0.24 square centimeter chip, an achievement believed to be the highest density reported so far in graphene devices.

In creating that array, they also demonstrated a clever new approach for growing complex graphene patterns on templates etched into silicon carbide. The new technique offered the solution to one of the most difficult issues that had been facing graphene electronics.

“This is a significant step toward electronics manufacturing with graphene,” said Walt de Heer, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics who pioneered the development of graphene for high-performance electronics. “This is another step showing that our method of working with epitaxial graphene grown on silicon carbide is the right approach and the one that will probably be used for making graphene electronics.”

Unrolled Carbon Nanotubes

For de Heer, the story of graphene begins with carbon nanotubes, tiny cylindrical structures considered miraculous when they first began to be studied by scientists in 1991. De Heer was among the researchers excited about the properties of nanotubes, whose unique arrangement of carbon atoms gave them physical and electronic properties that scientists believed could be the foundation for a new generation of electronic devices.

Carbon nanotubes still have attractive properties, but the ability to grow them consistently — and to incorporate them in high-volume electronics applications — has so far eluded researchers. De Heer realized before others that carbon nanotubes would probably never be used for high-volume electronic devices.

But he also realized that the key to the attractive electronic properties of the nanotubes was the lattice created by the carbon atoms. Why not simply grow that lattice on a flat surface, and use fabrication techniques proven in the microelectronics industry to create devices in much the same way as silicon integrated circuits?

By heating silicon carbide — a widely-used electronic material — de Heer and his colleagues were able to drive silicon atoms from the surface, leaving just the carbon lattice in thin layers of graphene large enough to grow the kinds of electronic devices familiar to a generation of electronics designers.

That process was the basis for a patent filed in 2003, and for initial research support from chip-maker Intel. Since then, de Heer’s group has published dozens of papers and helped spawn other research groups also using epitaxial graphene for electronic devices. Though scientists are still learning about the material, companies such as IBM have launched research programs based on epitaxial graphene, and agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have invested in developing the material for future electronics applications.

Georgia Tech’s work on developing epitaxial graphene for manufacturing electronic devices was recognized in the background paper produced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as part of the Nobel Prize documentation.

The race to find commercial applications for graphene is intense, with researchers from the United States, Europe, Japan and Singapore engaged in well-funded efforts. Since awarding of the Nobel to a group from the United Kingdom, the flood of news releases about graphene developments has grown.

“Our epitaxial graphene is now used around the world by many research laboratories,” de Heer noted. “We are probably at the stage where silicon was in the 1950s. This is the beginning of something that is going to be very large and important.”

Silicon “Running Out of Gas”

A new electronics material is needed because silicon is running out of miniaturization room.

“Primarily, we’ve gotten the speed increases from silicon by continually shrinking feature sizes and improving interconnect technology,” said Dennis Hess, director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) established at Georgia Tech to study future electronic materials, starting with epitaxial graphene. “We are at the point where in less than 10 years, we won’t be able to shrink feature sizes any farther because of the physics of the device operation. That means we will either have to change the type of device we make, or change the electronic material we use.”

It’s a matter of physics. At the very small size scales needed to create ever more dense device arrays, silicon generates too much resistance to electron flow, creating more heat than can be dissipated and consuming too much power.

Graphene has no such restrictions, and in fact, can provide electron mobility as much as 100 times better than silicon. De Heer believes his group has developed the roadmap for the future of high-performance electronics — and that it is paved with epitaxial graphene.

“We have basically developed a whole scheme for making electronics out of graphene,” he said. “We have set down what we believe will be the ground rules for how that will work, and we have the key patents in place.”

Silicon, of course, has matured over many generations through constant research and improvement. De Heer and Hess agree that silicon will always be around, useful for low-cost consumer products such as iPods, toasters, personal computers and the like.

De Heer expects graphene to find its niche doing things that couldn’t otherwise be done.

“We’re not trying to do something cheaper or better; we’re going to do things that can’t be done at all with silicon,” he said. “Making electronic devices as small as a molecule, for instance, cannot be done with silicon, but in principle could be done with graphene. The key question is how to extend Moore’s Law in a post-CMOS world.”

Unlike the carbon nanotubes he studied in the 1990s, de Heer sees no major problems ahead for the development of epitaxial graphene.

“That graphene is going to be a major player in the electronics of the future is no longer in doubt,” he said. “We don’t see any real roadblocks ahead. There are no flashing red lights or other signs that seem to say that this won’t work. All of the issues we see relate to improving technical issues, and we know how to do that.”

Making the Best Graphene

Since beginning the exploration of graphene in 2001, de Heer and his research team have made continuous improvements in the quality of the material they produce, and those improvements have allowed them to demonstrate a number of physical properties — such as the Quantum Hall Effect — that verify the unique properties of the material.

“The properties that we see in our epitaxial graphene are similar to what we have calculated for an ideal theoretical sheet of graphene suspended in the air,” said Claire Berger, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech School of Physics who also has a faculty appointment at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. “We see these properties in the electron transport and we see these properties in all kinds of spectroscopy. Everything that is supposed to be occurring in a single sheet of graphene we are seeing in our systems.”

Key to the material’s future, of course, is the ability to make electronic devices that work consistently. The researchers believe they have almost reached that point.

“All of the properties that epitaxial graphene needs to make it viable for electronic devices have been proven in this material,” said Ed Conrad, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics who is also a MRSEC member. “We have shown that we can make macroscopic amounts of this material, and with the devices that are scalable, we have the groundwork that could really make graphene take off.”

Reaching higher and higher device density is also important, along with the ability to control the number of layers of graphene produced. The group has demonstrated that in their multilayer graphene, each layer retains the desired properties.

“Multilayer graphene has different stacking than graphite, the material found in pencils,” Conrad noted. “In graphite, every layer is rotated 60 degrees and that’s the only way that nature can do it. When we grow graphene on silicon carbide, the layers are rotated 30 degrees. When that happens, the symmetry of the system changes to make the material behave the way we want it to.”

Epitaxial Versus Exfoliated

Much of the world’s graphene research — including work leading to the Nobel — involved the study of exfoliated graphene: layers of the material removed from a block of graphite, originally with tape. While that technique produces high-quality graphene, it’s not clear how that could be scaled up for industrial production.

While agreeing that the exfoliated material has produced useful information about graphene properties, de Heer dismisses it as “a science project” unlikely to have industrial electronics application.

“Electronics companies are not interested in graphene flakes,” he said. “They need industrial graphene, a material that can be scaled up for high-volume manufacturing. Industry is now getting more and more interested in what we are doing.”

De Heer says Georgia Tech’s place in the new graphene world is to focus on electronic applications.

“We are not really trying to compete with these other groups,” he said. “We are really trying to create a practical electronic material. To do that, we will have to do many things right, including fabricating a scalable material that can be made as large as a wafer. It will have to be uniform and able to be processed using industrial methods.”

Resolving Technical Issues

Among the significant technical issues facing graphene devices has been electron scattering that occurs at the boundaries of nanoribbons. If the edges aren’t perfectly smooth — as usually happens when the material is cut with electron beams — the roughness bounces electrons around, creating resistance and interference.

To address that problem, de Heer and his team recently developed a new “templated growth” technique for fabricating nanometer-scale graphene devices. The technique involves etching patterns into the silicon carbide surfaces on which epitaxial graphene is grown. The patterns serve as templates directing the growth of graphene structures, allowing the formation of nanoribbons of specific widths without the use of e-beams or other destructive cutting techniques. Graphene nanoribbons produced with these templates have smooth edges that avoid electron-scattering problems.

“Using this approach, we can make very narrow ribbons of interconnected graphene without the rough edges,” said de Heer. “Anything that can be done to make small structures without having to cut them is going to be useful to the development of graphene electronics because if the edges are too rough, electrons passing through the ribbons scatter against the edges and reduce the desirable properties of graphene.”

In nanometer-scale graphene ribbons, quantum confinement makes the material behave as a semiconductor suitable for creation of electronic devices. But in ribbons a micron or so wide, the material acts as a conductor. Controlling the depth of the silicon carbide template allows the researchers to create these different structures simultaneously, using the same growth process.

“The same material can be either a conductor or a semiconductor depending on its shape,” noted de Heer. “One of the major advantages of graphene electronics is to make the device leads and the semiconducting ribbons from the same material. That’s important to avoid electrical resistance that builds up at junctions between different materials.”

After formation of the nanoribbons, the researchers apply a dielectric material and metal gate to construct field-effect transistors. While successful fabrication of high-quality transistors demonstrates graphene’s viability as an electronic material, de Heer sees them as only the first step in what could be done with the material.

“When we manage to make devices well on the nanoscale, we can then move on to make much smaller and finer structures that will go beyond conventional transistors to open up the possibility for more sophisticated devices that use electrons more like light than particles,” he said. “If we can factor quantum mechanical features into electronics, that is going to open up a lot of new possibilities.”

Collaborations with Other Groups

Before engineers can use epitaxial graphene for the next generation of electronic devices, they will have to understand its unique properties. As part of that process, Georgia Tech researchers are collaborating with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The collaboration has produced new insights into how electrons behave in graphene.

In a recent paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the Georgia Tech-NIST team described for the first time how the orbits of electrons are distributed spatially by magnetic fields applied to layers of epitaxial graphene. They also found that these electron orbits can interact with the substrate on which the graphene is grown, creating energy gaps that affect how electron waves move through the multilayer material.

“The regular pattern of magnetically-induced energy gaps in the graphene surface creates regions where electron transport is not allowed,” said Phillip N. First, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and MRSEC member. “Electron waves would have to go around these regions, requiring new patterns of electron wave interference. Understanding this interference would be important for some bi-layer graphene devices that have been proposed.”

Earlier NIST collaborations led to improved understanding of graphene electron states, and the way in which low temperature and high magnetic fields can affect energy levels. The researchers also demonstrated that atomic-scale moiré patterns, an interference pattern that appears when two or more graphene layers are overlaid, can be used to measure how sheets of graphene are stacked.

In a collaboration with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a group of Georgia Tech professors developed a simple and quick one-step process for creating nanowires on graphene oxide.

“We’ve shown that by locally heating insulating graphene oxide, both the flakes and the epitaxial varieties, with an atomic force microscope tip, we can write nanowires with dimensions down to 12 nanometers,” said Elisa Riedo, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and a MRSEC member. “And we can tune their electronic properties to be up to four orders of magnitude more conductive.”

A New Industrial Revolution?

Though graphene can be grown and fabricated using processes similar to those of silicon, it is not easily compatible with silicon. That means companies adopting it will also have to build new fabrication facilities — an expensive investment. Consequently, de Heer believes industry will be cautious about moving into a new graphene world.

“Silicon technology is completely entrenched and well developed,” he admitted. “We can adopt many of the processes of silicon, but we can’t easily integrate ourselves into silicon. Because of that, we really need a major paradigm shift. But for the massive electronics industry, that will not happen easily or gently.”

He draws an analogy to steamships and passenger trains at the dawn of the aviation age. At some point, it became apparent that airliners were going to replace both ocean liners and trains in providing first-class passenger service. Though the cost of air travel was higher, passengers were willing to pay a premium for greater speed.

“We are going to see a coexistence of technologies for a while, and how the hybridization of graphene and silicon electronics is going to happen remains up in the air,” de Heer predicted. “That is going to take decades, though in the next ten years we are probably going to see real commercial devices that involve graphene.”

Provided by Georgia Institute of Technology

What’s your forecast for the 2011 semiconductor market?

Heervee — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:22:44 +0000

from Dylan McGrath

The 2011 semiconductor market forecasts have been trickling in over the past couple of months. Generally speaking, analysts are predicting modest, single digit growth.

Still, there is a significant spread in the forecasts. The predictions for 2011 semiconductor market growth range from 2.3 percent on the low end to 10 percent on the high end. For reference, here are the most recent growth forecasts from several of the analysts we track on the 2011 chip market.

Mike Cowan	+2.3%
VLSI	+4.4%
WSTS	+4.5%
Gartner.	+4.6%
iSuppli	+5.1%
SIA	+6%
Carnegie	+8%
Semico	+8%
IDC	+9%
Semiconductor Intelligence	+9%
IC Insights	+10%

To get a sense of where some high-ranking semiconductor industry executives stand on 2011, I put out a call for their thoughts on the market. Taking a page from sports book odds makers, I framed the question by asking if they thought 2011 market growth would be over or under Gartner’s forecast of 4.6 percent growth.

Though I cast a pretty wide net, I received relatively few responses. The reluctance of many executives to address this topic may be in reverence to the market analysts who are paid to predict such things. In a sense, they are acknowledging that it’s a tough job and they might as well leave it to the professionals. Of course, the reluctance might also have something to do with our litigation-happy industry; executives may be afraid to put a stake in the ground for fear of being sued by investors or others if their forecasts turn out to be off the market.

Nevertheless, some brave souls did step forward to offer their thoughts on the 2011 chip market. Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

“Atmel will take the over on 4.6 percent growth for the chip market in 2011,” said Steven Laub, Atmel’s president and CEO. “Strengthening in the advanced economies with continued rapid growth in emerging countries should provide growing demand for industrial and consumer electronics products. On the supply side, although semiconductor wafer capacity has grown substantially during 2010, supply remains tight, which bodes well for stable pricing throughout 2011.”

Despite the fact that some analyst—including Gartner—expect the memory chip market to contract in 2011, Mark Adams, vice president of worldwide sales at Micron Technology Inc., said he is optimistic about 2011 because “the market trends for memory are very positive.”

Adams said the explosion of digital content means all devices—not just PCs—need to be intelligent, meaning they must be able to process and communicate. The growing use of smartphones and the applications they run translate into more opportunities for DRAM and NAND flash memory, according to Adams. The growing use and sophistication of automotive electronics also bodes well for memory, he added.

“While the economy has been tough to gauge, if we see some stability, we are encouraged that new application areas will generate IC growth greater than the projection by Gartner,” Adams said.

source eetimes

13 fabless IC suppliers expected to top $1B in 2010 sales

Heervee — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:28:11 +0000

Altera, Broadcom, and MStar are each expected to register more than 50% sales growth this year, according to IC Insights.

By Suzanne Deffree, Managing editor, news — EDN, December 22, 2010

Being fabless can encourage fabulous revenue, as 13 fabless IC suppliers with sales topping $1 billion in 2010 and without the demands of in-house manufacturing have proven.

A forecast of the 2010 billion-dollar fabless IC suppliers, excerpted from a ranking of the top 50 fabless IC suppliers in IC Insights’ coming 2011 edition of The McClean Report, shows 13 fabless companies expected to register more than $1 billion in sales in 2010 up from 10 such companies in 2009 and eight companies in 2008. IC Insights reported that the 13 suppliers are forecast to have a combined $41.4 billion in sales and represent about 70% of the $59.6 billion worth of total fabless company IC sales expected in 2010.

The market research company said it expects Qualcomm to remain the number one fabless IC supplier in 2010. The mobile specialist is forecast to register $7.1 billion in 2010 sales on an 11% growth rate.

Meanwhile, number 8 Altera, number 2 Broadcom, and number 13 MStar are each expected to register more than 50% sales growth this year.

On the flip side, 2009′s fabless shining star MediaTek is forecast to show a slim 3% sales gain in 2010 after recording a 22% increase in 2009, moving its sales up to $3.5 billion during a down economy. IC Insights attributed the smaller sale growth to MediaTek’s lateness in developing devices for the 3G cell phone market.

“Overall, IC Insights believes that most of the large fabless IC suppliers will continue to do well and will help to drive significant sales gains by the pure-play foundries,” IC Insights President Bill McClean said in a statement, noting such foundries as TSMC, UMC, and GlobalFoundries.

“Moreover, as the barriers to entry (ie, high design costs, increasingly difficult access to venture capital money, etc.) rise, IC Insights believes that the total fabless IC supplier listing will continue to become increasingly “top-heavy’ in the future,” he said.

The eight Money Secrets From Warren Buffett

Heervee — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:09:31 +0000

We all have someone whom we admire and respect. For me one person on my shortlist is Warren Buffett who is sometimes referred to as the “Sage of Omaha“. I first heard about Buffett back in 2001 when I first started getting serious about investing and so I started reading all the titles with his name on it. Off course Buffett hasn’t actually written any of them but they were priceless none the less.

If you have never heard of Buffett, Forbes currently ranks him as the third richest man in the world and he is arguably the world’s greatest investor. He has amassed his fortune by making astute investment decisions and investing in businesses. Here is what I have learnt from Buffett:

1. Rich Is A State Of Mind
“I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.” – Warren Buffett

The difference between being poor and being rich is really just a state of mind. Poor people think thoughts of poverty and lack, rich people think thoughts of abundance and prosperity. Your beliefs are going to determine the way you perceive wealth, the decisions you make and the way you act towards it.

2. Success Is More Than About Your Bank Balance
When asked by CNBC what is the secret to success, Buffett replied “If people get to my age and they have the people love them that they want to have love them, they’re successful. It doesn’t make any difference if they’ve got a thousand dollars in the bank or a billion dollars in the bank… Success is really doing what you love and doing it well. It’s as simple as that. I’ve never met anyone doing that who doesn’t feel like a success. And I’ve met plenty of people who have not achieved that and whose lives are miserable.”

3. Spend Less Than You Earn
“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” -Warren Buffett

It seems like common sense advice and you’ve no doubt heard financial experts preaching about it for years. You can’t possibly get ahead financially if you’re spending more than your paycheck. Buffett is famous for living a simple and frugal lifestyle. He is the only billionaire I know that still lives in the same house he bought back in 1958 for $31,500. He drove a 2001 Lincoln Town Car for years which he bought second hand. Buffett has a net worth in excess of $52 billion and yet lives off an annual salary of $100,000. The relative percentage of his spending based on his overall net worth is minuscule.

4. Avoid Consumer Debt
The sooner we realize that consumerism is a social plague that has been propagated by billion dollar marketing machines to keep you shackled to your job, the sooner we can stop spending money on useless stuff. It is a fool’s game to spend today so that you can work tomorrow to pay it off. It is a losing proposition because one day your working days are going to be over but the debt is still going to be hanging over your head. Clever marketing has convinced our society that to be happy you have to have more, be more and do more. Buffett abhors consumer debt instead choosing to use debt wisely by leveraging it in investments. To help you deal with your debt consider reading “How To Get Yourself Out Of Debt“.

5. You Are Who You Associate With
“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” -Warren Buffett

If you want to succeed financially you need to associate with people who are most conducive to encouraging and cheering on your financial journey. If the people you associate with see money as evil, object to capitalism and find wealth a foreign concept then your financial health and well being is going to be influenced by their views. Whether we like it or not we are all influenced to some extent by the people we spend our primary time with. If you aspire to achieve financial security then you need to find a mastermind of people in your life whom you can all encourage and help each other.

6. Gambling Is A Fools Game
“Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.” – Warren Buffett

While we are young and naive we choose to take risks with our money that are dumb and stupid. Trying to hit a home run with your money every time is a losing proposition with long term consequences. To chase investments that offer a high rate of return you must also assume that it also comes with a higher rate of risk. Bill Gates once quipped “Warren’s and my betting has always been confined to $1 bets” when talking about them paying poker together. If two billionaires take risk management this seriously, it’s time we average punters did the same thing.

7. Give Back To The Community
“Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.” – Warren Buffett

They say that to have more you need to give more. A contradiction in terms, maybe, but it’s a simple truth that is as enduring as time. As the bible says “It is more blessed to give than to receive -Acts 20:35”. Buffett has announced in 2006 that he was giving away over $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation making it at the time of writing the largest charitable donation in history. He also contributes large sums to his children’s charitable foundations.

8. Generosity and Abundance Goes Hand In Hand
“Even though Ben Graham [Buffett's mentor] had everything he needed in life, he still wanted to give something back by teaching, So just as we got it from somebody else, we don’t want it to stop with us. We want to pass it along too.” – Warren Buffett

A famous bible quote goes: “What benefit will it be to you if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” – Mark 8:36. The path to wealth isn’t a solo endeavor. How sad would life be if you come to the end of your life and there is no one to share it with. So as you journey on your path to financial abundance remember that there will be many people who generously helped you on your journey so it is only fitting to pay it forward when the opportunity arises. Generosity with your time, with your money, with your resources are great virtues to have. The greatest ally to building a strong friendship is to help others achieve what they want from life.

I leave you with this last quote “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” – Warren Buffett

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Heervee — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:07:58 +0000

Moore’s law

Heervee — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:12:03 +0000

Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The quantity of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore’s law describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue “for at least ten years”. His prediction has proved to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.

History

The term “Moore’s law” was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead. Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Alan Turing in a 1950 paper had predicted that by the turn of the millennium, computers would have a billion words of memory. Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today’s mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959.

Moore’s original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication “Cramming more components ontointegrated circuits”, Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year… Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Global Semiconductor Monthly Report, August 2009, provided by Malcolm Penn

Heervee — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:44:41 +0000

Here are the excerpts from the Global Semiconductor Monthly Report, August 2009, provided by Malcolm Penn, chairman, founder and CEO of Future Horizons. There are a lot of charts associated with this report. Those interested to know more about this report should contact Future Horizons.

Fig. E1 — 12/12 Worldwide IC Monthly Growth Rates

Fig. E1 shows the 12/12 worldwide monthly growth rates for IC sales in dollars, units and ASP for January 1997 to June 2009 inclusive. They need to be looked at in conjunction with the other 12/12 and rolling 12-month charts provided in the Market Summary section of this report.

June’s total semiconductor sales came in at US$19.3 billion, heralding a US$51.7 billion second quarter, up 16.9 percent on Q1-09 (down 20 percent on Q2-08). This compares with Q1-09 that was down 15.3 percent on Q4-08 (down 30 percent on Q1-08) and confirms our 2009 forecast upwards revision, reported in last month’s Report and at our July Mid-Term Industry Forecast Seminar, that the worst of the chip market recession is now over.

We can now expect a seasonally strong Q3 (albeit not too strong) of around 12 percent growth on Q2-09 (down 16 percent on Q3-08) followed by a normal year-end slowdown in Q4 at plus 3 percent (up 14 percent on Q4-08) confirming our minus 14 percent forecast for the year as a whole. At last it is now back to industry normal abnormality.

There are wild fluctuations when looked at on an individual monthly basis meaning no single month’s data is a good indicator of the underlying trends. Each month is thus just another peg in the ground, especially during a period of rapidly changing conditions.

June’s minus 25.8 percent year-on-year growth thus looks closer to our original minus 28 percent forecast for the year, rather than the minus 14 percent we reforecast last month, but this does not take into account (a) the prospective second-half-year rebound and (b) the fact we will be measuring future 12:12 growth rates against a dynamic whereby the 2009 numbers are trending up whereas the 2008 numbers were trending down, amplifying the impact of the 2009 positive monthly trends. We should start to see this upward trend kick in again with the release of July’s WSTS data.

Table E1: 2009 Total Semiconductor Growth Rate Scenarios

Table E1 restates the 2009 growth by quarter for our three growth rate scenarios, reiterating our belief that minus 14 percent is still the most likely outcome, the worst-case scenario being only minus 16 percent. The forecast is thus relatively insensitive to the actual Q3/Q4 numbers (within reason).

There are still several wild cards however in play. Units are now much better aligned with real demand but ASPs are all still over the map, hardening in memories but weak in logic. So too is near-term fab capacity, with tight-geometry 300mm capacity now getting tight but ‘loose-geometry’ 200mm capacity still plentiful. This will send mixed signal on pricing over the second-half of the year, which in turn is likely to lull the industry into a false state of complacency.

The July move into positive territory of the Front-End Book-to Bill ratio may have finally broken the 34-month spell of a book-to-bill less than parity (i.e., since Sept 2006 aside from the 2 two-month blips), the actual spend numbers are still derisory in absolute terms. Spending is still currently more to do with linebalancing adjustments than capacity build out and will do nothing to alleviate the 2010 capacity shortage.

The Cap Ex billings run rate is circa $800m/month, supporting a chip sales rate of $16b/month; that is barely 5 percent of sales. So, either we have suddenly got 3x mega-efficient at building ICs (we have not) or we are building ourselves a massive capacity problem down the road (we are). The foundries (i.e., TSMC) will be the beneficiaries.

Fresh data points are now arriving each week indicating that the global electronics industry is rebounding from its 2008-09 financial meltdown. DRAM and PC sales are up with the impetus for renewed growth and recovery coming from Asia.

The IMF is currently forecasting a return to world GDP growth in 2010 at +2.5 percent, up from its +1.9 percent estimate made earlier this year, but the world could just as easily tip into a second global recession triggered either by the current sharp rise in oil prices or downstream inflation caused by the current excess liquidity and the longer-term need to increase interest rates everywhere.

Interest rate rises will hit everyone very hard indeed, especially those firms and individuals over-extended in debt, currently saved only by interest rates at near zero levels. We are thus nowhere near out of a moribund economy woods, indeed it is more likely to get worse before it gets better making a W-shaped economic recovery the most likely scenario, unless the economic balance of power has shifted to Asia as the new engine of economic growth for the 21st century.

Industry Capacity
Table C1 shows the quarterly semiconductor equipment sales trends for the period Q1-2008 through Q2-2009 inclusive. Total Q2-2009 equipment sales were US$2,666 million, down 13.3 percent from Q1-2009, which in turn was down 34.8 percent from Q4-2008. This represents the fifth successive double-digit quarterly fall in Cap Ex spend, unprecedented in the history of the chip industry.

Table C1: Quarterly Semiconductor Equipment Sales

Wafer processing equipment represented 72 percent of the total, just slightly lower than its 75 percent average. Total Q2-2009 investment represented only 7.2 percent of the quarterly semiconductor sales, although it must be remembered that an equipment sale in Q2-2009 will not produce incremental semiconductor sales until three quarters later, namely Q1-2010.

Q2-2009 wafer fab equipment sales were down 67 percent on Q2-2008, the fifth consecutive quarterly high double-digit drop, with further declines in prospect, albeit at a likely slower rate, bringing 2009’s Cap Ex in at between 50-60 percent down on 2008. Cap Ex levels are now running at levels not seen since the early 1990s when the overall chip market was one-third its current size.

The quarterly trends are not much better with Q2-2009 front end Cap Ex down 17.2 percent versus Q1-2009. This was on top of the four previous quarterly declines of 35.3 (Q1 vs Q4), 22.6 (Q4 vs Q3), 20.3 (Q3 vs Q2) and 27.2 (Q2 vs Q1) percent respectively.

It should not be forgotten that these cutbacks were not triggered by the current chip market recession; the first two quarterly drops, namely Q2 and Q3-2008, took place against a backdrop of strong IC unit growth, i.e. well before the Q4-2008 chip market collapsed. In other words, these cutbacks were premeditated not diagnostic which makes the current capacity dynamics different from before.

The cutbacks were thus a clear intent to engineer tight capacity, a strategy that would by now have bitten home had it not been for the cruel interruption of the Q4-2008 market collapse. This time is different … this has NEVER happened before.

Top 10 OEMs consume a third of all semiconductors

Heervee — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:47:32 +0000

According to Gartner reports – 2/9/2009 – Electronic News.

HP alone consumes more than 6% of semiconductor output in 2008, the research company said.

By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News — Electronic News, 2/9/2009

Powerhouse OEMs like Hewlett-Packard and Apple set a large part of the semiconductor industry’s tone, according to recent research from Gartner Inc.

The research house today reported that the top 10 OEMs accounted for $92 billion of the semiconductor market in 2008, representing a third of all semiconductor consumption. While that was a 3.8% decline from 2007, the leading applications remained PCs and mobile phones in 2008.

According to Gartner’s data, HP led the pack with $16.5 billion in 2008 semiconductor consumption, flat year over year. Apple’s consumption climbed 20% to place it at the number 7 position on semiconductor use in its computer and phone sales.

The top application areas remain data processing and communications electronics, which represented almost three-quarters of the semiconductors consumed by the top 10 OEM firms, Gartner reported. (See chart below.)

“The scale of the top 10 branded electronics firms’ semiconductor consumption really shows how important they are to setting some of the major direction for the semiconductor industry,” Alfonso Velosa, a research director at Gartner, wrote in the company’s Semiconductor DQ Monday Report issued this morning.

Velosa noted that the semiconductor consumption for these companies is bigger than most companies’ total business and that the cutoff to be in Gartner’s top 10 for 2008 was $6 billion.

“Changes in tactics or strategy these firms make have implications with wide repercussions in the semiconductor industry, especially because the semiconductor firms tend to have very high fixed costs if they have fabrication facilities,” he said.

Velosa illustrated his point with memory semiconductors sales. HP, the top PC OEM, is the major customer for DRAM, and Apple is one of the top two purchasers of NAND flash memory. “Beyond competitive dynamics, changes in these OEM firms’ business or contractual average selling price are a fundamental element for the major memory firms’ product and business strategies and have a major influence on their gross margins,” he said.

Indeed, Apple’s weight in the flash market is well known. Reports that the consumer-electronics maker had significantly slashed its 2008 NAND-flash orders encouraged iSuppli Corp to lower its total NAND-market estimates last year.

“In addition, given the scale of these branded electronic firms, their purchase patterns also indicate when key semiconductor technologies are starting to become adopted by mass markets and how they need to be integrated into the overall electronics supply chain to be viable,” Velosa said.

Again looking to Apple, Velosa credited the company as having demonstrated the viability of designs that integrate sensors, MPUs, and connectivity. “More importantly, it has integrated these semiconductors with operating software and a ‘user experience’ mentality that has resonated with consumers,” he said.

“Therefore, successful semiconductor firms have invested — and will continue to need to invest— in several areas: expertise in software; a focus on ease of use and the overall user experience; relationships with major content developers; and an understanding of the overall electronics ecosystem,” Velosa concluded.

2008 semiconductor consumption of top 10 OEMs by application category