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Ajinder Singh is passionate about semiconductor product definition, strategic marketing and branding. Ajinder leads a team of systems engineers at a major semiconductor company and has extensive experience working in China. He can be reached at ajinders@me.com or www.ajinders.com

American creativity and ingenuity was key to fight the trade wars with Japan, Korea and Mexico. China is a different story, however. "What is stunning about China is that for the first time we have a huge, poor country that can compete both with very low wages and in high tech," says Harvard University economist Richard B. Freeman. "Combine the two, and America has a problem." There is a myth that the U.S. would remain the knowledge economy and China the sweatshop.

The Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Silicon Series made a stop in Austin last week at the swanky Barton Creek Resort & Spa. Last year, when the GSA arranged a luncheon in Austin, the focus was on emerging home networking technologies, consumer electronics and mobile computing. This time around the presentations were strictly focused on semiconductor technology, particularly analog and mixed signal design. The meeting was kicked off by Sanjay Krishna, presently a consultant and semiconductor expert at Keystone Strategy, with a high level overview of mixed signal design and trends. Tyson Tuttle, SVP and COO at Silicon Labs, gave the keynote speech titled “Opportunities in Analog/Mixed Signal Design.” The meeting was concluded with a panel discussion on “The Brave New Frontier of Analog/Mixed-Signal at 28nm and Below.” The panel was moderated by Mahesh Tirupattur, Executive VP at Analog Bits, and the panel included: Joze Alvarez - Design Collateral Manager at Freescale Semiconductor, John Heinlein - VP of Marketing for the Physical IP Division at ARM, Ana Hunter - VP Foundry at Samsung Semiconductor, and KT Moore - VP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Magma Design Automation.

Last time we caught up with Quantance was all the way back in 2008, at which point the company just completed a Series B round of funding and was hard at work on their first chip, namely the Q1000. The company has made quite a bit of progress hence, the least of which is sporting a new logo and an updated web-site with spiffier graphics. The technology and general idea remain the same, but at least this time they are illustrated with style - just take a look at the picture below and compare it to the one in out previous post:

Hardly anyone these days dares to dream of starting a semiconductor startup which owns its own fabs. The costs of doing so are simply too prohibitive and thus most adventures minds in the semiconductor industry instead elect to pursue the fabless path. The other day, Dr. Rakesh Kumar, the founder and CEO of Technology Connextions, as well as the author of a recently published book tilted Fabless Semiconductor Implementation, and a long time semiconductor industry veteran gave a day long presentation at UT, Austin regarding implementing a fabless semiconductor startup. What follows below are some of the major takeaways from the presentation: