Is Intel the Concorde of Semiconductor Companies?

By SemiWiki

January 15, 2014

An Intel executive recently told me that my Intel articles on SemiWiki are used to motivate employees to work hard and prove me wrong. The converse is also true. The senseless Intel fabless ecosystem bashing motivates me to continue to write so it is a win-win scenario, absolutely. In fact, I should credit Intel's Mark Bohr for motivating me to write a book chronicling the great and powerful fabless semiconductor ecosystem, but I won’t.

At the SEMI ISS conference this week there were some excellent presentations filled with important market data. Most of which I already knew but seeing it all in one place with a historical perspective was well worth the price of admission. And networking with industry executives from around the world is priceless. I had lunch with David K. Lam, founder of famed semiconductor equipment manufacturer LAM Research. How cool is that!?!?!

Unfortunately, I do not have permission to post the slides so I will summarize the best I can:

The Concorde reference is from the keynote by Rick Wallace, President and CEO of KLA-Tencor. The point being that the Concorde failed not because of technology, it failed because of economics and lack of competition, adding that Moore’s law is much more likely to die in the board room than the manufacturing floor. This is absolutely true.

In my biased opinion, that is Intel’s problem exactly.

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