<<
When were you last current in this industry?...when did you retire? Your views are extremely dated. SiGe is mainstream all ready. I believe it will overtake GaAs in shipments for high speed communications applications this year. The fact that it integrates into conventional CMOS processes makes true system on a chip solutions a reality. Intel needs to get into this technology (either buying it or developing it themselves) in a big way if they want to compete in future
high speed RF and mixed signal applications. Barrett has said this all ready. Where have you been sleeping?
>>
For wireless apps, a specialized chip application, it's like GaAs.
For Intel's (or IBM's) main output of wafers, it's not going to get integrated-in anytime over the next several years.
The same analysis could have been made about many niche technologies (SOS, MBE, I^2L, etc.) back in 1980.
As for my background and current involvement, I'm an investor in a wireless company doing multi-GHz/ultrawideband chips. Their main need is for processing speed, at high integration densities. Pure blazing transistor speed is only need at the front-end (near the antenna), not at the back-end. (Sure, they'd take the pure blazing speed at the back-end if it cost the same as 0.18 micron CMOS, but it doesn't, and won't for many years.)
The context of the hype du jour about IBM's "breakthrough" is that this represents a threat to Intel. It doesn't.
As for your "Where have you been sleeping?" barb, you are about to enter my killfile. Bye!
--Tim May |
