Word: silicones
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When rising Third World incomes meet the shrinking cost of technology, multinationals are betting that markets will bloom. In October Silicon Valley's Advanced Micro Devices introduced a $185 Personal Internet Communicator--a basic computer--for developing countries, while Taiwan-based VIA Technologies plans to launch a similar device costing just $100. Motorola last month unveiled a no-frills cell phone priced at $40; the cell-phone manufacturer says it expects to sell 6 million cell phones in six months in markets including China, India and Turkey. "You've got nearly 2 billion people who will be buying a phone...
...largest growth industry" in espionage, says Edward O'Malley, an FBI assistant director in charge of the intelligence division. Some recent examples: a Northrop engineer pleaded guilty in March to attempting to transmit Stealth technology to the Soviets for $55,000; the husband of a worker at a Silicon Valley defense firm used his wife's access to sell high-tech documents on ballistic-missile research to Polish intelligence for some $250,000; and in a trial that began last Friday in Los Angeles, Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov, two Soviet émigrés, are accused of attempting to buy secrets...
That may sound like a simple enough statement, but it represents a profound revolution in the way the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker--long the powerhouse of Silicon Valley--does business. Forty years ago this April, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that given advances in transistor miniaturization, computer processors should double in speed every 18 months. Not only did Moore's law become the most trustworthy truism in technology, it was also the rock on which all Intel marketing was founded. Why did you need a PC with an Intel Pentium II processor? Because it was four times as fast...
...Otellini, who will become CEO in May, that reality has the makings of a crisis. And in fact the Pentium 4 issue was only one of a whole host of mishaps and missteps that Intel found itself confronted with in 2004. The LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip for high-definition TVs, a pet project of Otellini's that (as president and COO) he had announced with much fanfare in January 2004, was abandoned in November when the cost of production became prohibitive. Waggish engineers made a disco ball out of defunct LCOS chips for Intel's holiday party...
...unlike PC manufacturers and retailers, who have to deal with wafer-thin margins, Intel--thanks to its dominant position--enjoys a 55% profit margin on every $300 PC chip. "Most companies would kill to get margins like that," says Nathan Brockwood, senior analyst for Insight 64, a Silicon Valley research firm...