Word: semiconductors
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...shirt on-air - but he's no ivory-tower ingenue. "Energy," he says, "is all about money." He cut his teeth in the entrepreneurial culture of Bell Labs and spent the rest of his career around Silicon Valley; he's served on the boards of a battery company, a semiconductor firm and two biotech start-ups. In his last job, he shook up the bureaucracy of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to tackle real-world energy problems, while becoming a leading expert on energy innovation. "He's brilliant, and he understands the full breadth of the energy portfolio...
...hasn't been tricky subprime and Alt-A loans tripping up the folks in Idaho; it's been the flailing economy. At 10.1%, Boise's unemployment rate is above the national average and nearly twice what it was this time last year. As big employers such as HP and semiconductor maker Micron lay off thousands of workers, job losses cascade through other industries and small businesses. If people can't make their mortgage payments, foreclosure follows. Perverse as it sounds, that is the housing market working as it should. (See pictures of Americans in their homes...
...hired to manage a state-funded research institute, but shortly after his arrival, an influential technocrat, Li Kuo-ting, called Chang to his office and told him: "Think about how you want to start a company." The conversation led Chang, backed by state funding, to found Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), now the world's largest chip foundry and one of Taiwan's most prominent firms. That was just one part of the island's big push. Other electronics manufacturers - makers of notebook PCs, memory chips, LCD panels and other essential components - also set up shop, establishing Taiwan...
...example, when Austin's semiconductor industry started tanking in 2000, ACC quickly stripped down its chip-development courses and soon repurposed clean rooms for emerging green technologies. These days, it generally takes about six months of weekend classes to get qualified to be a solar installer, a job that can pay up to $16 an hour. But starting in August, a compressed weekday program - catering to the recently unemployed - will allow students to cram the same courses into just two months. To earn an associate degree focusing on renewable energy - enough prep for a job as a solar-installation-team...
Search is facing the same problem as the chip business. Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) make semiconductors that are so powerful, very few PC buyers can use all of their computational power. A lot of what the chips can do is wasted. Upgrading to a more powerful processor does not mean much to people who cannot tell the difference. That leaves a few corporations and people who play complex video games as the only discriminating buyers of PCs with ultra-powerful processors. Just three or four years ago, the difference between one generation of semiconductor and another meant something...