Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes Perspectives from the Leading Edge, PFTLE, rises from the internet black hole that it was thrust into to become Insights from the Leading Edge, IFTLE. Not much will change except the blog location. IFTLE will try to bring you weekly insight into the technical and business comings and goings in the 3DIC and IC packaging segments of our microelectronics community.

First a little background on what happened. Unbeknownst to me, Reed Elsevier the owner of Semiconductor International, owned a portfolio of magazines with a broad reach of topics. When the board decided to exit the magazine business they decided to simply close down many of them. Thus on April 16th I received a message from "headquarters" thanking me for my activities with them and terminating me and all the rest of the Semiconductor International staff. After a few seconds of shock I contacted Aaron Hand (Editor) and Dave Lammers (News Editor) and received confirmation that, indeed, Semiconductor International was no more.
I quickly tried to get back onto the web site to add some verbiage to let all of you know what had happened and tell you that I would be looking for another site to host PFTLE, but alas, I had been locked off the web page (no hard feelings, I’m sure I would have done the same thing if the situations were reversed). Having worked for a 25+ billion dollar company for most of my career, I had watched many a "big dog" get escorted off the company grounds after being told that they were terminated ….that’s simply the way it is done. Two weeks later and the web site semiconductor.net was closed and links to 3 years worth of my material now pointed into a black hole !

Emails from friends and readers began coming in questioning what was going on and pointing out that their links to my stories and blogs were now pointed no where.

The good news is that while the blogs are legally "work made for hire", my contract allows me a "worldwide, perpetual license to publish , display and distribute the works after 3 months of exclusivity". So I’m in the process of reloading the 128 blogs. By your readership of 7000 – 10,000+ hits per month, I think many of you would agree that these blogs contain a lot of worthwhile information that all of us would like to continue to access.

I will continue to refer back to these in IFTLE, and will give you all the URL to the site as soon as everything is locked down and tested. The plan is to index these so you will be able to access any and all information about a given company or topic from this new web site.

I have decided to join forces with Solid State Technology. Editor Pete Singer, while with Semiconductor International , was actually the person who gave me the opportunity to do all of this back in the summer of 2007. I look forward to working with Pete and his competent staff as IFTLE moves forward.