Ah, Electronic News. Alas, we hardly knew ye. A venerable institution within the chip industry, you were around for decades, the semiconductor industry trade pub of record, before succumbing to the financial, social, and technical realities of the Information Age you helped usher in.
I worked for Electronic News from January 2000 until May of 2006, covering process technology and the capital equipment that used that technology to turn silicon and metal into chips. It was a crazy ride.
The dotcom boom’s bubble was peaking and poised to burst, leaving barely anyone in Silicon Valley unscathed by its financial shrapnel, myself included. But we didn’t know that then, back in the halcyon days of ’00. The print edition of Electronic News folded in December of 2002; I was laid off and subsequently rehired to work on the online edition of Electronic News — now truly electronic – and remained there until I was laid off again in 2006. It has since been absorbed into a sister publication EDN — Electronic Design News.
Well, now I can say it: they were WRONG!
Below are all of the clips I have harvested from my E-News days to reside here, sorted chronologically in reverse — blog entries, editorial columns, new stories and whatnot.
Again, if you’re looking for some more granularity, you can use the categories and tags over to your right, or use the links below.
Agilent: Old Dog Learns New Tricks in Chengdu
CHENGDU, China – Being in the right place at the right time — a cliché, except perhaps in business, where timing and geography can often mean the difference between success and failure. Especially for a U.S. technology company looking to take advantage of the booming market here. So when Palo Alto, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies Inc. announced a joint venture (JV) 10 months ago with a fellow test and measurement instrument maker based here, Chengdu Qianfeng Electronics Ltd. Corp., it raised a few eyebrows in the West. Why form this...
read moreStartup Vies for Opto Market with Homegrown IP
XIAMEN, China – Startups and entrepreneurs are popping up all over China and this southern coastal city, which is also a center of the optoelectronics industry in China, is no exception. Chinese optoelectronics has a bit of a head start over its silicon semiconductor device industry; one of Xiamen’s opto device companies was founded more than two decades ago. But then it also plays host to Xiamen UX High-Speed IC Co. Ltd. UX was founded less than three years ago by a handful of engineers, including Chinese — one of them local...
read moreXiamen: A Bright Light in China’s Tech Industry
XIAMEN, China – If you’ve bought a set-top box recently or perhaps a new appliance – or if you’ve used a remote control in the past decade – there’s a reasonable chance you were utilizing one or components that came from Xiamen Hualian Electronics Co. Ltd. Or if you’re a Wall Street analyst or venture capital firm trying to finger the few start-ups among the multitudes in China that will be successful, or if you compete in the optoelectronics device market, you’ve probably at least heard of a few of the...
read moreTI China Engineers Straddle Two Different Cultures (part 2)
SHANGHAI – Editor’s Note: Electronic News Senior Editor Jeff Chappell continues to discuss how working for a U.S.-based international chip company means more than straddling geography and time differences with China-based Texas Instruments engineers Tan Hui, a member of the technical staff and an application manger in the industrial and home appliance semiconductor group; Michael Wang, system engineering manager in the portable power management semiconductor group; Eric Braddom, director of DLP products for TI’s Asia semiconductor...
read moreTI China Engineers Straddle Two Different Cultures (part 1)
SHANGHAI – Editor’s Note: At the behest of Texas Instruments Corp.’s Jeff Smith, deputy director of Asia Semiconductor Communications, as well as worldwide manager for analog media/analyst relations, four TI China engineers sat down with Electronic News Senior Editor Jeff Chappell to talk for an afternoon, but not about TI or its latest products. Rather, they discussed the experience of being an engineer and working for a U.S.-based, global company doing business in China. The four engineers — three of them Chinese —...
read moreApplied Applies Guan Xi
SHANGHAI — Applied Materials Inc.’s business in China illustrates just how beneficial the right relationships can be here, the so-called “guan xi.” It’s a concept not always easy for the West to grasp; at the same time it has become a rather mythical aspect about doing business in China. A U.S. company that is the biggest process tool vendor in the world, Applied has had operations on the ground here since 1984. Today, the company employs about 400 people at five sites around the country, with about 300 at its...
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All original content posted here -- words and images -- are copyright © Jeff Chappell 2009-2012 unless otherwise noted.
Jeff Chappell: journalism nerd; web geek. That's the short story. Want the longer one?