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― THE FRIDAY
LETTER ―
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 254.0/July 7, 2006
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HEADLINES:
▪ The Week / Now is the Time
to Invest in PLDs
▪ Book of the Month / The End of
Medicine, by Andy Kessler
▪ Friday Blogger Bonus / Q&A with Kessler: The Disruption of Doctors
▪ Readings /
The Week / Now is the Time to Invest in PLDs
‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
Gilder Tech Analyst Charlie Burger (06/28/06): Now is the time to invest in programmable
logic devices (PLDs), and there’s no better way to do that than through Altera
(ALTR) and Xilinx (XLNX).
In contrast to ordinary chips with designs permanently fixed in manufacture,
PLDs are customized in the field by the users, who interconnect or program a
mesh of logic circuits by blowing or retaining fuses between prefabricated
“gates.” Users thus bypass the complex and costly upfront procedures used to
make and test application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
The
downside of programmability, however, has always been increased chip size and
exponentially higher costs. Larger chips are more likely to be defective and
fewer of them fit on the wafer. A 10% increase in size, for example, might
double a chip’s cost. To lower these costs, customers often design prototypes
using PLDs, particularly field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), that can be
programmed in their sockets, and then transfer the design to an ASIC for volume
production.
As
shown by the downward swoon of ASIC sales, this pattern is now breaking down.
As Moore’s law doubles the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months, the
up-front costs rise for design, verification, and masks for ASICs. While
becoming larger and targeted for more specialized niches, ASICs need
ever-larger volumes to make them economical.
Meanwhile,
the same Moore’s law trend improves the cost, speed, and capability of FPGAs
that can be programmed after production for thousands of different customers.
This means ASICs will be marginalized to the highest volume products or to
bleeding-edge applications where performance is more important than cost. FPGAs ultimately take over. As we said last
month, the industry could end up making just one Altera or Xilinx chip with
nearly infinite volume and make it available nearly free. You can pay for the
software that programs it . . .
(Excerpted from the July 2006 issue of the Gilder Technology Report.)
To read the complete list of SIX REASONS WHY NOW IS THE TIME TO INVEST IN
PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC DEVICES, visit www.Gildertech.com
and log on with your subscriber ID.
|
Gilder/Forbes TELECOSM Conference world's leading
technology and communications companies. |
Book of the Month / The End of Medicine, by Andy Kessler
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You get sick; you go to your doctor. Too bad. Because medicine isn't an
industry, it's practically witchcraft. Despite the growth of big pharma, HMOs, and
hospital chains, medicine remains the isolated work of individual doctors --
and the system is going broke fast.
So
why is Andy Kessler -- the man who told you outrageous stories of Wall Street
analysts gone bad in Wall Street Meat and tales from inside a hedge fund
in Running Money -- poking around medicine for the next big wave of
technology?
It's
because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge
chunk of medical spending, yet there's surprisingly little effort to detect
disease before it's life threatening. How lame is that -- especially since the
technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and
colon?
Because
it's too expensive -- for now. But Silicon Valley has turned computing,
telecom, finance, music, and media upside down by taking expensive new
technologies and making them ridiculously cheap. So why not the $1.8 trillion
health care business, where the easiest way to save money is to stop folks from
getting sick in the first place?
Join Kessler's bizarre search for the next big breakthrough as he tries to keep from passing out while following cardiologists around, cracks jokes while reading mammograms, and watches twitching mice get injected with radioactive probes. Looking for a breakthrough, Kessler even selflessly pokes, scans, and prods himself.
CT
scans of your heart will identify problems before you have a heart attack or
stroke; a nanochip will search your blood for cancer cells--five years before
they grow uncontrollably and kill you; and baby boomers can breathe a little
easier because it's all starting to happen now.
Your
doctor can't be certain what's going on inside your body, but technology will.
Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology
to health care, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it.
The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your
Doctor, Available Now on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006113029X/gilderpublish-20
Related Reading from the Gildertech Blog:
http://blog.gildertech.com/index.php?/archives/14-The-Notoriously-Schizophrenic-Stock-Market.html
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Q&A with Kessler: The Disruption of Doctors
‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
Excerpted from Michael Urlocker’s On Disruption (07/05/06).
Question: Andy, what got you interested in looking
at the medical business and what got you to thinking that it is ripe for
disruption?
Reply: I’ve spent over 20 years tracking the
technology business for Wall Street, as an analyst and then as an investor.
The only thing I really learned was to find the silicon. Once you
find a market that is attacked by silicon, you only have to wait for big
markets to come into being from nothing. Silicon gets cheaper every year by
30%, it halves in price every two years. If you find something that works
today, but is too expensive, then wait a bit and the fireworks start.
I was bored looking at traditional markets, computing, telecom,
wireless, even music and video. I drifted around for a while, sniffing at other
interesting things when I learned that a friend was diagnosed with cancer, by
accident, as he had banged his head skiing and an X-Ray and CT scan showed a
tumor on top of his neck. A brother-in-law had a heart attack. I wondered if
silicon could be found in medicine to be able to detect disease much earlier. I
was astounded by what I found.
Ripe for disruption is an understatement. $2 trillion a year is
spent on healthcare in the
Question: Are doctors to become
the bank tellers of their industry, to be replaced by better, smarter,
automated processes or online procedures that customers would prefer to deal
with.
Reply: Think about what happened to telephone operators. Switches
came along and performed their function better and cheaper. Eventually,
switching happened so quickly, telephone calls could become cheap and
ubiquitous. A machine embedded the intelligence of the operator.
Same for bank tellers. A slightly more complicated task, ATMs embed the
intelligence of the teller into silicon and software and lower the cost of
transactions.
Same for auto mechanics. They fix the problem, but silicon diagnoses what is
wrong with autos today, embedding the intelligence of the mechanic into the
system. At $60-75 per hour charged by service stations for labor, the payback
for an automated diagnosis system is quick.
The same thing happened to stock
traders…So why not doctors. I went for a physical and my doctor took my blood
pressure, looked into my ears and the took out a rubber hammer and banged my
knee. $440 for nothing. Was I going to have a heart-attack?
Read the complete interview:
http://www.ondisruption.com/my_weblog/2006/07/qa_with_andy_ke.html
|
A N N O U N C I N G : The Gildertech Blog |
Readings /
‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
What Broadband
Problem?
http://www.aei-brookings.org/policy/page.php?id=259
The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/business/05leonhardt.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
Screen
Refresh
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA6348058.html?nid=2067
Life After DFM
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA6348061.html?nid=2067
Clearwire
Nixes IPO Plans After $900M Investment
http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA6349975?nid=2019&rid=2052959400
AMD
Slashes 2Q Sales Outlook
http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=L3QCD4X1OL1M2QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=190300859
Malpass:
Inflation Remains The Key Variable
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2IxOGZlNGUwNGRlNjcyZWE3YTQ5Nzk2ZGFkMWI1N2U=
Tamny:
Investors Have A Message For The Fed
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2IxOGZlNGUwNGRlNjcyZWE3YTQ5Nzk2ZGFkMWI1N2U=
Bowyer:
Hate To Burst Your (Housing) Bubble
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWY4YTc0OWNhNTU4NDY1NjI0NGZkN2EyOGUwZWMxYzM
Karlgaard:
Why Gold Prices Matter
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/
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