CEO Interview: Eric Broockman, Alereon, Inc.

Alereon is an Austin semiconductor firm specializing in high-bandwidth, low-power Wireless USB and WiMedia UWB chipsets for PCs and portable products. Alereon's AL5000 Worldwide Wireless USB Chipset is currently the only silicon that operates over the full 3.1 to 10.6 GHz spectrum, giving developers all 49 UWB channels across all 14 UWB bands over which to transmit.

Portable Design interviewed Alereon's CEO Eric Broockman about his views on Ultrawideband, Wireless USB and a wide range of wireless issues that affect portable designs. Catch the video below and watch for the interview in a forthcoming issue of Portable Design.



If you'd rather listen to Eric, click on the podcast below, which you can also download here.

CEO Interview: Mark Thompson, Fairchild Semiconductor

After inventing the planar semiconductor and giving birth to the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, Fairchild Semiconductor has gone on to become a premier power semiconductor company--and more, recently, an active advocate of green technology, an area where it's well positioned to make some significant contributions.

Portable Design sat down with Fairchild's CEO Mark Thompson to catch up with his views on portable power, green power, and where the semiconductor industry is headed. The following video is an excellent primer on all three. The interview will appear in the February, 2008 issue of Portable Design.

Carl Schlachte Interview 4 Dec 07

Portable Design interviewed Carl after his 2007 ConfigCon keynote, following up on some of the issues he raised and raising some of our own. Interesting, informative and relatively short (11 min.).

Interview with Joe Mitola

On November 6, 2007 at the SDR Forum Tech Conference in Denver, I interviewed Joe Mitola of Mitre Corp. Mitola is–to understate his role–one of the originators of Software-Defined Radio and cognitive radio (CR). This interview runs 54 minutes, but it’s entertaining, wide ranging and an excellent update on SDR and CR theory and practice.

You can listen to the interview below or download the podcast here.

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ARC CEO: SIP Vendors Must Adapt to the YouTube Generation

ARC’s CEO Carl Schlachte kicked off this year’s ConfigCon in Santa Clara today, declaring that for semiconductor and SIP providers, “Value is in the experience of the consumer.”

In a presentation entitled “Technologies Enabling the YouTube Generation,” Schlachte exhorted semiconductor and SIP vendors to “put technology in the background and clearly address user needs.” PMP users don’t care if you have a 7-stage SIMD pipeline, they just want to watch high-quality videos that aren’t jerky; and the ODMs who cater to them don’t care either, they just want something that works.

For the full story, please go to http://www.portabledesign.com/news/104.

The video follows below.

Carl is a lot more entertaining than my writeup would indicate. Ignore the "2008" flash screen--it's the 2007 conference.

OR, if you'd prefer to listen to Carl while you're fighting traffic, you can listen to the following podcast or download it here.

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MOT’s Down, Ed’s Out

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the axe finally fell today on Motorola’s beleaguered CEO Ed Zander. Motorola surged to massive profitability based on the wildly successful Razr, becoming the #2 cell phone maker behind Nokia. Since then Motorola has steadily been losing both market share and money. Sales fell 36% in Q307, resulting in an operating loss of $138 million. That was actually an improvement over the previous quarter, but with Samsung—the new #2—now eating Motorola’s lunch and with Carl Icahn—this decade’s answer to Chainsaw Al Dunlap— gunning for Zander’s scalp, it was time for Ed to “spend more time with [his] family.”

The problem, as Paul Sagawa, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, points out, is that “the cavalry has been slow in coming in with new products.” Since the Razr all Motorola has been able to come up with is 26 different flavors of the same formula, which has gotten stale. When the Razr was introduced a couple of years ago, it was the epitome of cool; now it’s ‘so last week’. Meanwhile, Samsung has mastered the ‘art of cool’, which is mostly what matters among younger users, who buy most cell phones. The iPhone has removed any question that styling trumps technology any day, as long as you have cool features. The iPhone is hardly innovative, with the major exception of its physical design and user interface. Motorola has traditionally had great engineers but—except for what will hopefully not prove to be one brief moment in time—crappy designers.

I had a Motorola StarTAC over 10 years ago and marveled at its small size but dog ugly appearance. You needed either two hands or a long thumbnail to flip it open. It sold well until Nokia came out with an ultra-slim, chrome-cased beauty that caused a mad rush to the phone stores. Motorola just continued to ride that same pony into the ground.

In stepping down, Zander passed the baton to Greg Brown, Motorola’s COO, whom Zander has long groomed as a successor. That’s another classic Motorola problem, perpetuating a culture that clearly needs to change. Motorola has successfully reinvented itself several times in its history, almost always belatedly, and thus more painfully than needs be. Having jumped into a market that moves much faster than it does, Motorola needs to poach top leadership talent from Nokia, Samsung, Sony/Ericsson or Apple. Bring in fresh new ideas and shake things up. In Bob Dylan’s words, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Buy a smartphone or a computer? Hmm

In-Stat reports that sales of OS-based smartphones will grow at more than 30% CAGR for the next five years, taking increasing market share from their dumber counterparts. The unit volume for smartphones already exceeds unit sales for laptops. In-Stat predicts that smartphone use will grow mainly from their use as a laptop replacement. This is understandable, since they’re basically scaled-down, under-powered laptops with a phone attached.

U.S. carriers have long subsidized handset prices in order to lock you into two-year exclusive contracts with punitive bail-out pricing. Remove that subsidy and the price differential between a Blackberry and a cost-effective but capable laptop practically disappears. If you could just turn off the RF portion and flip out a usable keyboard, smartphones could completely replace laptops for road warriors on plane flights. Or am I the only one who manages to sit behind the guy who reclines his seat practically back into my lap?

Smaller laptops could fight back by adding cellular capabilities, maybe tossing in a Bluetooth headset to make calling easier. But that would give major heartburn to the carriers, whose business plans require you to buy a phone. Also, phone calls aside, while the fastest data network at the moment—Verizon’s EV-DO—can theoretically give you 2.4 Mbit/s downloads, in my experience that requires a hurricane-force tailwind. My laptop’s EV-DO data card is a nice backup when I’m out of range of a Wi-Fi connection, but the slowdown is still painful. My primary business phone is a laptop-based ‘softphone’ from Vonage that works over a Wi-Fi link, which over a cable modem at home delivers a reliable 5 Mbit/s. When I’m not in the office, incoming calls roll over to my smartphone.

So while the growth rate for smartphones is impressive, they leave a lot to be desired as laptop replacements. Still, if you feel you just have to respond right away to an email from your boss that arrived while you were out to dinner, your Crackberry addiction will continue to keep smartphone sales at an all-time high.