There’s growing concern that the U.S. is losing pace in semiconductor start-ups (although we’ve seen intriguing outliers leveraging crowd-funding to make products). Rick Merritt at EE Times, in a recent piece, quoted Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan as framing a more dire situation than most have suspected. According to Merritt: “China and India are pouring money” into semiconductors and “the U.S.

SAN FRANCISCO–I’ve written for many years about the new development paradigm in the semiconductor industry, given cost constraints and other factors. Since venture capitalists aren’t giving entrepreneurs any love, it’s time to leverage crowd-funding, as we’ve seen in successes like Adapteva. Now comes a battery-charging idea, based on Georgia Tech patents, that’s seeking funding. Potential Difference Inc., a company founded

MILPITAS, Calif.–I had an insightful meeting here the other day with Brett Fox, a recovered venture capitalist who is running the analog components startup, Touchstone Semiconductor. Fox is a longtime analog guy (Maxim mostly) who spent some time as VC. His assessment of VCs as a group is critical (arrogant, egotistical, etc.) but he also understands the VC value, since

It's a (fill in the blank) new world today in innovation. In the old, old days, you had technology companies named after the innovators who founded them. Hewlett-Packard. Watkins-Johnson. Varian Brothers. Then startups chose names associated with their technology: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Linear Technology, Analog Devices. Today innovators choose goofy but memorable names (Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon) and often,

(Odometer: 18,657 miles) PLANO, Texas–Let's be honest, when you pull up to a company as part of the "Drive for Innovation," everybody tells you about how innovative they are, whether their latest product is innovative or not. More design resources Nevertheless, even though our culture over-uses this word, it's an important topic because innovation leads to higher-value products and services,

In almost any EE Times survey we've done over the decades (whether it's Salary and Opinion Survey or something else), engineers overwhelmingly view themselves as entrepreneurs. More than three-quarters will say they will start a company at some time in their career. In reality, about 10 percent do. This bubbled up in my mind as I read Bruce Gibney and

CHICAGO–Nothing’s getting slower in life, that’s for sure. In business, the latest mission-ritical application is high-frequency trading, where investment banks are building their own server farms and, in some cases, their own servers, to get any nano-second information or trading edge on competitors. That edge means big bucks. Enter Kove, a closely held Chicago-based storage solutions provider whose technology addresses