At Intel Corp.’s big developer conference this week, the chip giant was extolling the virtues of its newest little chip, called the Atom. The Atom has surprised both company executives and analysts with its popularity among hardware makers. The chip was introduced in March and is aimed at an emerging market of very low-cost mobile devices, especially in developing countries.
In the latest indication of the deep downturn in the semiconductor capital equipment industry, Netherlands-based ASML Holding (ASML) warned that its 2008 revenues could be down 20 percent from 2007.
The company posted second-quarter sales of 844 million Euros, down from 919 million in the first quarter, and from 930 million a year ago. Second-quarter net income was 192 million, including a tax credit of 70 million, compared to 145 million in the first quarter, and 160 million in the year-ago quarter. Bookings in the quarter totaled 632 million Euros, boosting backlog to 1.1 billion Euros.
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We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cellphone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down–and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).
While it was some 20 years that the Qualcomm IT department instigated a recycling effort that’s still in effect on the Qualcomm campus today, it is within the last five years that Qualcomm has made its biggest strides. In 2004 it began construction on a new corporate building and attached a data center to the corporate offices.
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