From Kalamazoo to Silicon Valley and Beyond (K2SV+)

     C onsumer electronics was the most exotic and strategic beat at EE Times in the 1990’s, made all the more fascinating because it was covered by our most passionate and nontraditional reporter, Junko Yoshida. It was exotic because its products were all about having fun and its center of gravity was in faraway Japan. The country leveraged the 1947 invention of the transistor and the semiconductor industry that quickly rose around it to pull itself from the wreckage of World War II. Along the way, it wrote the book on how to build small stuff in high volume with top quality, skills at the heart of chip making. In the 1960s, it had its first hit products with some of the early transistor radios. They used thin chips to replace fat vacuum tubes, enabling AM/FM radios that, for the first time, you could slip into a shirt pocket. Pretty cool. Japan Inc. was built on what followed – TVs, cameras, VCRs and the chips and other key components inside them. For example, it ...

     I digress, as most people trying to describe Junko probably do. The point is she’s written a barrel of stories. Her on-going career includes scoops about hot topics like high-profile failures of electric and autonomous cars and China’s first multibillion-dollar government fund to fuel its tech race with the US. In the 1990’s, her best work was focused on consumer electronics. In those days, TV, broadcasting networks and movies were all analog. You couldn’t search or play their content without help from a newspaper and a movie theater. But “the world trend is digital,” according to a speech from a director of Japan’s broadcasting bureau that Junko quoted in a 1994 story. We all knew the digital transition could take decades. It would require inventing new technologies and standards. New hit products would emerge and current favorites would become passe. In such transitions fortunes are made, leading companies fade away and scrappy startups become the new giants. ...

     L ater, Japan Inc. took Sony’s advice and created a software platform it was confident would win the race to mobile computing. The I-mode service was a hit in Japan’s Akihabara electronics shops where scores of Japan-made flip phones (like the one below) used it on their tiny screens. At EE Times , we saw I-mode and the Japan giants behind it as a viable player, one of many contenders – until the Apple iPhone arrived and Japan had again lost the race to a next-big thing. What went wrong? “By 2000, Japan was so confident of itself it thought it would take over the electronics world,” Junko said in a recent phone interview from Paris. “It lost the bigger picture.”  Essentially, Japan Inc. forgot the lesson of its early success – focus on serving big international export markets. Instead, it got distracted by the local tech fashions that sprouted up in its small domestic market, styles that consumers in the rest of the world found uninteresting, even inscr...

       L eonardo Chiariglione (below) was an unlikely source to get quoted in a US semiconductor trade newspaper like EE Times . Grey, bearded and portly, the researcher at Telecom Italia, Italy’s main phone company, was about as far removed from Silicon Valley and its surging chip industry in space and style as an engineer could be. But in the go-go years of the 1990’s, television was going digital. It was an unusual time that called for unusual characters. And Chiariglione had two skills that suited him for the moment, according to Junko Yoshida who helped bring him to the tech world’s attention: He was objective and gregarious.  Chiariglione’s Turin lab was far enough away from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Tokyo that he could see the common issues very different kinds of engineers in those places were facing. And, like Junko, he was a people person. “Leonardo was a rare breed, a foreign exec who got into the hearts and minds of Japan’s engineers,” she ...

     I f Shakespeare was a playwright in Japan in the 1990s, he might have devoted a minor tragedy to Ken Kutaragi (below). The Japanese engineer came up the ranks at Sony to become a father of the Playstation. It was the first videogame console to sell more than 100 million units, surpassing Nintendo and Sega who had been the leaders in video gaming, but he nearly lost the franchise with a risky bet on technology. I interviewed Kutaragi twice. The first time was in March 1999 , right after he presented at a top semiconductor conference details of the chips that would power the Playstation 2, eighteen months before the consoles would actually be available in U.S. stores. By then, Kutaragi was already a media darling, a crowned prince of consoles holding court at a major confab of chip designers. He saw himself as an alpha engineer, so he granted interviews to deep tech press like EE Times . I suspect he had a love/hate relationship with the limelight. His English ...

     A few weeks before I got laid off at EE Times in 2019, I had an idea for a feature story that turned out to be one of the most fun of all the articles I ever wrote there. Here’s a shortened version of it: Rummaging through my desk drawer of retired gadgets recently, I came across my SanDisk Sansa Clip. It was my favorite product from a golden age of digital consumer electronics, and it got this passionate music fan through a rough transition from physical CDs on my bookshelf to intangible files on the internet. A fraction of the size and weight of the Sony Walkman I loved in my college years, the Sansa Clip held an astonishingly large library of music. I could fasten it like a stumpy black clothespin to my t-shirt or shorts, plug in my headphones and take it out for a jog or bike ride, the times I most love listening to music. As memories flooded back, I decided to seek out and thank the engineer who led the design team. Without too much trouble, I found Bill ...