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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 286.0/March 9,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / The Enduring Miracle of
Micron
- Friday Feature / Anadigics Advances
- Friday Blogger Bonus / The Books that Made a
Difference
- Readings /
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The
Week /
The Enduring Miracle of Micron
George Gilder (March 2007 Gilder Technology Report): How strong and enduring
is company culture?
Broached
in a recent Gilder Technology Report by Nick Tredennick as he
contemplated the incipient war between what he called “the suits and the
cowboys” in broadband wireless wifiddles and fiberdoodles, the question arises
again as I revisit the enduring miracle of Micron Technology (MU) in
Boise, Idaho. Celebrated in a recent IEEE study as the owner of the world’s
most cited and influential portfolio of intellectual property, ahead of IBM
(IBM), Qualcomm (QCOM), and everyone else, Micron once again is poised
to break out into global leadership in semiconductor memory technology.
Also
raising the issue of culture is our longtime favorite Semitool (SMTL), a
presumptive though unidentified Micron supplier and a kindred cowboy company in
nearby (as the jets fly over Glacier National Park) Kalispell, Montana. Both
companies are leaders in the most significant on-going development in
semiconductor fabrication technology—the move to copper metallization. Requiring
a complete transformation of roughly one third of the steps in wafer
fabrication, copper affords a cleaner more planar process with higher yields of
good die at smaller geometries. It also enables faster and more robust devices.
Under the guidance of former Chief Technical Officer, now Chief Operating
Officer Mike Durcan, Micron has leapt to roughly a two year lead on the
industry in moving to copper for both dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and
for Flash memories. No one is saying how they did it, but Semitool has the only
copper equipment in the industry optimized for memories.
It
was a quarter century ago that I first stumbled on the fateful name of Micron.
I was lucubrating through the night for Ben Rosen and Esther Dyson on the Rosen Electronics Letter high in the Pan
Am building in Manhattan. (During the daylight hours, Esther reserved her
precious Apple 3s for the PC Letter, soon
to be dubbed Release 1.0 as Ben went
off to found Lotus and Compaq.) Going down a list of a dozen or so elite microchip
companies slated to introduce the next-generation DRAM, I discovered the
unknown name “Micron,” coming as I recall after Hitachi (HIT), the
British industrial policy play Inmos and IBM and before Mostek, Siemens
(SI), and NEC (NIPNY). The new chip was to hold an astounding 64
kilobits of information, then enough to carry as much as a second of a voice
telephone conversation.
Experts
regarded this next-generation memory as a supreme test of industrial might that
could be met only by government supported giants in Asia and Europe or by
global behemoths such as IBM. At the time the memory chip industry was slipping
massively, like an Al Gore glacier, toward Japan. Peter Drucker sourly remarked
that “making memory chips in the United States is like producing pineapples in
North Dakota.” Robert Noyce and Andrew Grove of Intel (INTC) and Jerry
Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) were assuming Churchillian poses
and invoking Pearl Harbor analogies as they implored the U.S. government to
bail them out as they resisted the Japanese juggernaut.
When I discovered that Micron was not the subsidiary of some Japanese goliath but an American born entrepreneurial story, I flew to Boise in a snow storm, where the pilot made three attempts to land and narrowly missed the control tower before returning to Salt Lake City… I later decided to write an entire book on this amazing company. It was published in 1985 as The Spirit of Enterprise (now available as Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise). It is still perhaps my favorite among all my works.
Find
out why Micron (MU) is still one of George Gilder’s favorite companies by logging
on with your subscriber ID at http://www.gildertech.com/.
|
The Telecosm
Lounge |
Friday Feature / Anadigics Advances
Charlie Burger, Gilder Technology Report (02/27/07): Anadigics
(ANAD) continues to advance its industry leading radio frequency and process
technologies in order to drive its world-beating power amplifiers and tuners
deeper into local wireless networks, 3G cell phones, cable television set-top
boxes and infrastructure, and broadband links including both fiber and
wireless. For example, new power amps for handsets, developed with Qualcomm
(QCOM), reduce power consumption by 75%, for up to 25% more talk-time, by
integrating bipolar and field-effect transistor devices on the same die. Inside
Intel (INTC), Anadigics has been instrumental in helping to set WiMax
standards into 2008. And later this year, the company will ramp digital tuners
for the upcoming DOCSYS 3.0 cable modems that handle multiple channels
simultaneously to increase bandwidth and data rates for digital and
high-definition television.
With
cash, investments, and receivables of $44m (net all book liabilities) and a
quick ratio of cash to current liabilities of 2.6x, Anadigics is strong
financially and getting stronger as cash generated from operations continues to
grow, likely surpassing the rate of capital spending around mid-year. Uncertain
is how or if new fab capacity, which must be up and running in two years, will
affect the balance sheet or shareholder value.
To learn Charlie Burger’s thoughts on the company’s two-year revenue
projection, based on its expanding share of the rapidly rising teleputer,
broadband, and digital media markets and its inside collaborations with the
likes of Qualcomm (QCOM), Intel (INTC), and Cisco (CSCO), log
on with your subscriber ID at http://www.gildertech.com/.
|
Gilder’s
latest GAINS |
Friday Blogger Bonus / The Books that Made a Difference
IEEE
Spectrum asked 14 leading technologists to name the novel that
influenced them the most. You'll be surprised at how often they agreed.
Nick
Tredennick, Editor,
the Gilder Technology Report, Great Barrington, Mass:
Member,
technical advisory boards for many start-ups, editorial advisory board for IEEE
Spectrum; author of Microprocessor
Logic Design: the Flowchart Method (Digital Press, 1987)
Novel: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1957)
First read it: In high school
“I generally don’t read fiction, there being only one in the last 50 books. I
suppose it would be Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. Its reasoned arguments left a lasting impression.
In the ‘any book’ category, I recommend Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One
Lesson.”
Read
IEEE Spectrum’s The Books that Made a Difference:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar07/4927
____________________________________
Readings /
Wesbury, Kudlow and Laffer on Deflation (CNBC, video link)
http://www.ftadvisors.com/retail/Pages/economicresearchpage.aspx
RFID Inside
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar07/4939
The Books that Made a Difference
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar07/4927
Why the SEC Can’t Stop SPAM
http://www.forbes.com/home/security/2007/03/08/sec-spam-stock-tech-security-cx_ll_0308spam.html
The Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
Beware Apple’s iPhone Froth
http://www.forbes.com/technology/entertainment/2007/03/08/apple-nokia-motorola-pf-ii-in_ty_0308soapbox_inl.html
Google Defends Its Clicks
http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/2007/02/28/google-click-fraud-tech-ebiz-cx_rr_0301google.html
__________________________________________
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Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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