Recently, there has been much analysis and detective work dedicated to unraveling what Intel's dabbling in the foundry business means. But trying to read those tea leaves is a fool's errand. We do not yet know how involved Intel will eventually become in the foundry market. And neither does Intel.

Like my colleagues, I do not believe that Intel is poised to jump whole hog into the foundry business, competing with the likes of TSMC, UMC and Globalfoundries. The world's biggest chip vendor has in recent years dipped its toe in the foundry waters through deals with compa......

In a conference call with analysts after his company turned in yet another stellar financial report card last April 24, Tim Cook, Apple Inc.'s CEO, was pressed to explain how the market for PCs could remain a separate, discreet market from for tablets. (In other words, how can Cook expect sales for its MacBook Air notebook PC to continue to grow at the same time iPad proliferation continues).

Cook said he strongly believes that the markets for these products will remain distinct and that Apple had no intention of kowtowing to the "compromises of convergence."

......

On a human scale, tracking the destruction caused by last year's Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent tsunami was a heart-wrenching experience. With more than 15,000 people known dead, many more displaced and video of houses being tossed like scraps of paper on massive waves, not to mention a nuclear power plant on the cusp of a full on meltdown that would have hurt many more, the availability of photoresist for making semiconductors seemed in many ways trivial.

But such is the world we live in. Our hearts went out to Japan, but our heads viewed the devastation with an......

Earlier this month, things seemed bleak for Globalfoundries when it announced an amended wafer supply agreement with its top customer and former parent company, AMD. The upshot was that AMD was willing pay Globalfoundries $425 million and give up its remaining stake in its former manufacturing unit in exchange for the right to have 28-nm accelerated processing units (APUs) built by another foundry (presumably TSMC).

It didn't sound good. Yes, we set out our headline as "AMD ditches Globalfoundries." But in retrospect that seems like a gross oversimplificat......

Industry cooperation has always been significant to the semiconductor industry. It has always been fascinating to me to attend an industry conference and hear an engineer provide detailed data about technical achievements and breakthroughs to a room full of people that includes some of their biggest competitors. As men and women of science, engineers are steeped in a tradition of openness and the knowledge that great achievements are built on the shoulders of other great achievements.

On the business side, as an industry, the semiconductor industry has always been pretty g......

In the realm of circuit design, we usually hear that analog doesn't scale. This, apparently, is hogwash.

"You can scale it [analog]. You just have to do some optimization," said Joseph Shor, a principal engineer at Intel Corp., in a presentation made that the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco Tuesday (Feb. 28).

Shor, who presented a paper about a thermal sensor included on Intel's newest microprocessors, said his group demonstrated the ability to scale the sensor by a factor of 3X from the 32-nm node to the 22-nm node. &......

"I have been joking for five years that this merger would happen when Rick [Hill] and Steve [Newberry] retire as you then have the egos out of the way and you can effectively merge the companies," said Dean Freeman, an analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc. "Looms like this is Steve and Rick's swan song," he added.

Newberry, the CEO of Lam Research Corp., was already set to step down as CEO on Jan. 1. Hill, chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems Inc., is apparently planning to retire after Lam's $3.3 billion, all stock acquisition of Novellus clos......

It has been tackled so many times, by now it sounds like a broken record: venture capitalists, long the lifeblood nurturing a thriving community of semiconductor startups, have all but abandoned the chip industry. They have, instead, turned to social media and green energy technologies, where the common wisdom is a smaller investment can go a lot further.

We've heard many times, too, that its hard to blame them. The fact of the matter is that bringing a chip to market, even for a fabless company, has become an ultra-expensive proposition requiring on the order of $30 million o......

[Continued from Peek at hot gadgets for 2012 (Part 1)]

iHealth

Here's the must-have consumer gadget for the geriatric set. Brookstone's iHealth blood pressure monitoring systemworks directly with iPods, iPhones and iPads and includes a diary for tracking blood pressure measurements taken by the included blood pressure cuff and dock. According to Brookstone, iHealth "makes tracking your blood pressure elegant, simple and—dare we say it—fun." Knock yourself out.

Home networking router
According t......

Let's turn our attention to the hot gadgets for 2012, especially since the holiday season and the Consumer Electronics Show is rapidly approaching.

The pickings are slim. Other than a few expectations—some obvious, some not—detailed on the following pages, analysts don't expect a lot of must have CE gadgets to burn up the Amazon sales rankings in 2012.

"I really don't see any CE gear becoming the next Beanie Baby or Tickle Me Elmo for 2011," said Jordan Sulburn, a principal analyst for consumer electronics at IHS iSuppli. "T......