5 Reasons You Can’t Do It Yourself

By Jack Harding - 25 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding With the recent Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Board of Directors vote to create a new category of semiconductor company, the value chain producer’s contribution to the overall industry has been formalized and made permanent. This should come as no surprise. The VCP market segment is closing in on $1 billion in annual sales. The category has evolved from a conceptua... » read more

Purging Inefficiency

By Jack Harding - 20 Feb, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding The Value Chain Producer (VCP) segment of the semiconductor industry was recently formalized by the GSA. This is particularly good news for the fabless world, which can benefit from a business model designed to increase quality, efficiencies and access to technology. Quality is addressed by a VCP through a variety of means, but it all stems from the aggregation of skill se... » read more

The GSA’s Big Opportunity

By Jack Harding - 28 Jan, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding The Global Semiconductor Alliance, the GSA, is at the front lines of a great opportunity. As the semiconductor industry has become a 24-hour-per-day, seven-day-per-week flywheel of activity and innovation, there is only one organization in the world poised to keep pace. It was no stray coincidence that precipitated the renaming of the Fabless Semiconductor Association, the... » read more

Coming Of Age

By Jack Harding - 17 Dec, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding I recently participated in a panel hosted by TSMC. The other panelists represented EDA, IP and Foundry market segments. We were asked to comment on new business models as a means to facilitate more design-starts in companies large and small and, otherwise, make it easier to be in this business with increasing NREs and greater complexity. To my delight the EDA guy talked... » read more

It’s All About Attitude

By Jack Harding - 19 Nov, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding When I started my career at IBM, one of the favorite sales lines we used was, “No one ever lost their job because they chose IBM.” In the burgeoning business computer market, that was true. Why? It wasn’t the size of the company. Actually, we were forbidden to link customer success with IBM’s “bigness,” which was an artifact of the Consent Decree with the U.S. Dep... » read more

The Five Percent Solution

By Jack Harding - 29 Oct, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jack Harding When it comes to internal operations, “Do it yourself is dead.” By internal operations I mean all those activities from netlist to EOL (end of life). After all, nobody makes their own EDA tools or wafers. So, why are there a thousand companies with teams of 5 to 200 all doing the same job and, in many cases, poorly? How good can you be at making one or two 65 or 40 nm ch... » read more

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