Word: semiconductors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young, aspiring fund manager's dream. Early this month, mutual-fund giant Fidelity reached into obscurity and fingered Matthew Grech, 28, a semiconductor analyst, to run its faltering, $2 billion Select Electronics mutual fund. Bull-market madness? Perhaps. But if it is, Fidelity is not alone. With record amounts of capital flowing in ($30 billion just last month), mutual-fund firms are hunting for fresh talent in novel places--not quite kindergarten, but not very far removed from school...
...Edward Snow--then set out to make silicon usable. After months of work, they discovered that most of the MOS instability was traceable to an impurity--sodium--introduced when the chips were cured. Like a drop of lemon juice added to a cup of milk, sodium soured the precious semiconductors. The discovery solved a fundamental problem in materials science and set the stage for the semiconductor revolution. Grove and his team won one of the industry's most prestigious awards for the work. At home, Eva got a hint that Andy might not be your ordinary Hungarian busboy...
...moved out to California, where Grove entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. Again he was a star. When he graduated, he had the pick of American research corporations. Grove narrowed his choices: prestigious Bell Laboratories or Fairchild Semiconductor, a start-up staffed by a handful of brilliant engineers. Grove, who says he has "excellent antennae," listened to the Berkeley buzz and came back with a sense of the future: Fairchild...
...with Fairchild. The firm was blowing up: engineers were leaving, top execs didn't understand the semi business, and science was being replaced by politics. Noyce phoned Arthur Rock, now the eminence grise of Silicon Valley investing, and told him that he and Moore wanted to start their own semiconductor company. Fairchild, he said, was finished. Rock (who holds nearly $500 million of Intel stock today) raised the money nearly instantly. Moore told Grove of the plan one day when they were at a conference in Boulder, Colo. The decision to join his bosses was made, Grove says, "almost instantly...
...board. Success breeds imitators. Imitators flood the market with goods. Prices (and profits) come down. Again, take Intel. It supplies nearly 90% of the microprocessors in PCs worldwide--a more commanding grip than even Microsoft's stranglehold on PC operating systems. But to protect its position, Intel has cut semiconductor prices faster than anyone expected as rivals Cyrix and Advanced Micro Devices compete furiously to supply cheaper components for the $1,000 PCs now taking the world by storm. Intel's profit margin has eroded from nearly 63% a year ago to an estimated 58% today, says analyst Caroline Gangi...