SEMI, in collaboration with leading strategic investing groups throughout the global semiconductor industry, has announced the Silicon Innovation Forum (SIF) to bridge funding gaps for new and early-stage companies with valuable semiconductor manufacturing and technology solutions. SIF will be held in conjunction with SEMICON West, on July 9, 2013 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. The event will consist of a one-half day conference highlighted by investment presentations from new and emerging companies with innovative technology solutions targeted at next-generation semiconductors. The Silicon Innovation Forum is being organized by leading strategic investment groups in the industry including Applied Ventures, Dow Chemical Company, Intel Capital, Micron Ventures, TEL Venture Capital, and Samsung Ventures.

Denny McGuirk Courtesy SEMI“At a time when the need for new ideas and technologies has never been greater, venture capital and private funding sources for advanced semiconductor technology development has significantly declined over the past decade, threatening the future of Moore’s Law and the economic engine of today’s connected electronic society,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “The Silicon Innovation Forum will address these funding gaps by providing a platform for new and emerging innovators, strategic investors, and venture capitalists to discuss the needs and requirements for next-generation technologies, and provide insights into technology, capital, partnership, and collaboration strategies necessary for mutual success.”

This unprecedented collaboration of leading strategic investor groups from throughout the world has formed to streamline and accelerate partnership opportunities for technology entrepreneurs to bridge the gap between R&D and product development funding. The Forum will provide short-term business opportunities for early / mid-stage companies, R&D entrepreneurs from larger companies, and other industry innovators while addressing long-term structural changes to the industry necessary to foster a healthy innovation pipeline.

New and emerging companies can showcase their innovations through tabletop and/or poster displays for one-on-one meetings with qualified investors, and they can showcase their ideas in short pitches during the SiF Conference. The SIF Conference will be free to all SEMICON West attendees, but the Innovation Showcase and Reception for one-on-one presentation and meeting opportunities will be restricted to qualified partnership and investor groups.

For more information on the Silicon Innovation Forum and for information on how to participate visit: www.semiconwest.org/sif

by Jeff Dorsch

Paul Otellini – courtesy IntelWhen Paul Otellini, the president and chief executive officer of Intel, retires next May, he will have served for eight years in the giant chipmaker’s top post. Intel has had five CEOs since it was founded in 1968. That means he will step down shy of the average nine-year tenure for an Intel CEO.

The announcement of his retirement comes as Intel is making the transition to the post-PC era of computing. Mobile devices, principally smartphones and tablet computers, are increasingly becoming the choice of consumers for accessing the Internet, checking e-mail, going on social networks, and playing games and videos. Corporate enterprises are recognizing the trend in adopting “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies for their employees. Desktop PCs are dirt cheap these days and laptop computers are scarcely more expensive than desktops.

The trend to mobile electronics has hit hard at Dell and Hewlett-Packard, the one-time champions of the PC industry. These former stalwarts have been been supplanted by Lenovo Group as the king of the hill in personal computers. Much of Lenovo’s recent strength is due to its home base – China – is the only global region still experiencing growth in PC sales.

Intel has seen the writing on the wall about refocusing on smartphones and tablets. The market verdict on whether it can achieve dominance in low-power mobile processors is still out; rival ARM Holdings is aggressively addressing that market while going upmarket with 64-bit processor designs that could go into high-performance servers and supercomputers, areas that have traditionally been strong for Intel’s Itanium and Xeon processors.

Advanced Micro Devices is going through its own struggle in shifting its focus from PCs to mobile devices, microservers, and other high-growth applications.

At this point, Otellini would be graded “incomplete” on whether he has successfully guided Intel into the burgeoning era of mobile electronics. The company’s Atom processors and other chips still may prove to be widely accepted in mobile designs. Maybe they will go into Apple’s iOS-based products. Maybe not.

Otellini’s greatest triumph, in the eyes of many observers, was persuading Big Blue to use Intel’s 8088 processors in the IBM Personal Computer, a decision that dealt a crushing blow to Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector (now Freescale Semiconductor), National Semiconductor, and Zilog. When the IBM PC was “cloned” by other computer manufacturers, they overwhelmingly chose Intel processors for their PC models, which helped Intel become the world’s largest chipmaker, measured by annual sales. That was, howver, over three decades ago.

Intel is likely to choose an internal candidate for its next CEO. Whoever that person is will inherit a substantial competitive challenge.

by Jeff Dorsch

What can the technology industry expect in President Barack Obama’s second term? If American history is any guide, the answer won’t be “More of the same.”

Broadly speaking, second presidential terms have often proved to be troublesome for re-elected incumbents, especially in the past four decades. Since he doesn’t have to face another election in his political career, it is widely assumed that President Obama will go for making significant progress on burning political issues, such as the federal deficit and debt, immigration reform, and taxation.

There was a stark difference between President Obama and his Republican rival, former Governor Mitt Romney, on a variety of issues, including technology policy subjects and related topics.

 The Technology page of the White House website sets out a dozen “examples of progress” in the president’s first term, including the naming of the federal government’s first chief technology officer.

While tech policy didn’t get much attention in the 2012 campaign, there are five leading tech issues facing the Obama administration in the second term, Heather Kelly of CNN writes in an analysis. They include copyright piracy, cybersecurity, and privacy rights. The U.S. Senate has twice this year turned back consideration of cybersecurity legislation, with Republicans objecting to government oversight of computer networks run by private enterprises. In response to that rejection, the administration is expected to go ahead with an executive order mandating the protection of critical infrastructure in the U.S.

In addition to consumer privacy and infrastructure cybersecurity, the allocation of wireless spectrum is a leading topic. “This president has laid out a very aggressive mobile agenda and has begun to execute on it. I think the next four years are really going to be about execution, execution, execution,” said Bryan Tramont, a managing partner at Wilkinson, Barker and Knauer. Tramont once served as the chief of staff for Michael Powell when Powell was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

“We have to do everything we can to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, wherever we find it,” President Obama said in an address last year. “We should be helping American companies compete and sell their products all over the world. We should be making it easier and faster to turn new ideas into new jobs and new businesses. And we should knock down any barriers that stand in the way. Because if we’re going to create jobs now and in the future, we’re going to have to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth.”

The next four years will determine whether the Obama administration can achieve those lofty goals.

by Jeff Dorsch

The third generation of Intel desktop processors, marketed as the Core vPro Processors, is the latest type of microprocessors you’ll find in PCs. Their cousin for use in servers is the Xeon E3. All these processors are commonly known as “Ivy Bridge” processors, for their microarchitecture. “Ivy Bridge” is the successor to the “Sandy Bridge” architecture, which represented the second generation of Intel’s Core processors.

Long after processors have their formal launches and get their official brand names, they often retain their code names in media coverage and other references. “Sandy Bridge” was originally known as “Gesher,” the Hebrew word for bridge, but Intel dropped that code name when it learned that there once was an Israeli political party by that name.

Intel doesn’t want to attract controversy over its code names, as it did with Frank Zappa’s estate when it gave the “Zappa” code name to a chip project in 1995. For the most part, it has used geographic place names for its code names. There was a long string of processors named for rivers in California and Oregon – Clackamas, Deschutes, Klamath, Merced, Nehalem (a microchip architecture), Tillamook, Tualatin, Yamhill. North American place names represent a big portion of Intel’s code names now, including Bonnell (the first-generation Atom processor), for Mount Bonnell in Austin, Texas, where Intel has an IC design center. The code-name lexicon has gone worldwide, too, and there are a number of Hebrew words, thanks to Intel’s operations in Israel.

The successor to the “Ivy Bridge” and “Sandy Bridge” architectures is the “Haswell” architecture, which is apparently named for a town in Colorado. Chips with the “Haswell” architecture will be released in 2013.

Processor code names aren’t confined to Intel, of course. Advanced Micro Devices also names its chips and microarchitectures in development. The “Bulldozer” and “Piledriver” architectures are in its newest accelerated processing units, which combine CPUs with graphics processing units in one chip. AMD has resorted to international place names, such as Barcelona, Budapest, Geneva, Istanbul, Ontario, and Shanghai, for various processors. An island theme has emerged in recent years. The Radeon HD 6000 was code-named “Northern Islands,” the Radeon HD 7000 was “Southern Islands,” the forthcoming Radeon HD 8000 is code-named “Sea Islands,” and products set for 2014 and 2015 are reportedly code-named “Volcanic Islands” and “Pirate Islands.”

The electronics industry, as well, likes to employ code names for products in development. Google has famously named its releases of the Android mobile operating system after sweet treats, and done it in alphabetical order, no less. Starting with Android 1.5, they’ve had Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. While Apple retained “Lisa” as the official product name for an early desktop PC, the Apple III was code-named “Sara.” Microsoft Windows 95 was called “Chicago.” The IBM Enterprise Storage Server was “Shark.”

What’s your favorite industry code name?

By Jeff Dorsch

The introduction of Windows Phone 8 by Microsoft – wait a minute, let me close the window. There’s too much noise outside from people rushing to buy a new iPad.

There, that’s better. Okay, back to Windows Phone 8. The Microsoft mobile operating system was introduced a week ago, shortly after the formal launches of Windows 8 and Windows RT for computers. Like those operating systems, Windows Phone 8 features touch-screen capabilities that fit in well with smartphones in particular. (Tablet computers will generally employ Windows 8.) Nokia, once the mobile-phone champion of the world, tied up with Microsoft in early 2011 and made a big commitment to implementing Windows Phone (which was preceded by Windows Mobile) in its product line as an alternative to the open-source Symbian operating system that previously formed the OS basis of its phones. As a result, Nokia is on the Windows Phone 8 bandwagon, as are HTC, Samsung Electronics, and other leading phone purveyors.

The mobile electronics market is not evolving as the PC market did. The “Wintel” duopoly, which had Windows running on computers with Intel processors, is not what it once was and isn’t a strong contender in the smartphone market. Intel is getting its low-power Atom processors into some new smartphones and tablets, all of which run on Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Windows Phone is far, far, far behind Android and Apple’s iOS among mobile operating systems. The question now is whether Microsoft and Nokia can regain their leadership positions on the strength of Windows Phone 8.

It is too early for the market’s verdict, of course. Yet Microsoft clearly has ambitious plans for its mobile OS.  There’s an online Windows Phone Store to find the all-important apps for your Windows-based smartphone. And there are even reports that the company is looking at the prospect of developing a Microsoft-branded smartphone, now that it has delved deeper into the hardware market with its Surface tablet computer. (Its only previous hardware was the Xbox game console and its related Kinect motion sensor.) The software giant is looking toward hardware and services (such as its Windows Azure cloud-computing platform) to regain its growth mojo. Windows Office applications and the Windows OS business aren’t as big and profitable as they once were.

Could Microsoft regain the dominance it once enjoyed? Should it? Or is it time for other companies to take the industry spotlight? What do you think? Please leave a comment below.