Brian Halla, CEO, National Semiconductor
A sour economy is the best time to go back to school they say… if you can afford it of course!
Well, that’s what I just did yesterday when I spend my “lunch break” listening to National Semiconductor CEO lecture at San Jose State University.
And really, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world as the colourful executive took pleasure to wake up the engineering students with some blunt views about his own semiconductor industry and frankly their potential future.
You be the witness. Here are some comments Halla made during his talk. Take it away Brian – doesn’t he look a bit like Larry Ellison?
Moore’s lesser known law: “Survival Interval”
“It was during days that were darker than this [the current economic crisis], during the transition of the PC industry. And Gordon Moore coined the phrase, the ‘survival interval’: you take your cash and divided by your payroll and that give the number of months you can stay alive if you get no more bookings, no more business”.
Moore’s Law is the enemy of green
“It’s flat out, spend as many gate as you need to, don’t worry about the power consumption… but we are all worry about power now”.
The whole world is returning to an analog world
“It’s just the way it is because the real world is not 0s and 1s, it’s analog… But you watch… everyone of your favourite digital companies will start talking about their analog capabilities”.
How many images are stored in the brain, the ultimate analog information processor?
“There are no images stored in the brain. The brain doesn’t scale. How could there be millions of images, you brain would be this big and overheating… using Moore’s law! What the brain does – it’s an analog engine, an analog information processor – is its deconstruct images based on hints. Following into this you’ll find out that also goes a long way explaining Deja Vu, because it’s reconstructing images before the action happens”.
Fun quotes on the Tesla electric roadster car
“With a Tesla roadster, If you want to go from San Francisco to Santa Barbara you’ve got to find someplace where you can eat lunch for 12 hours while it recharges!”
“Tesla is kind of like artificial intelligence. It’s always just a couple years away. I’m on the waiting list for a Tesla. I’ve been on the waiting list for 3 or 4 years!”
National Semiconductor’s Solar Magic technology aim to improve battery performance
“Battery technologies in these electric vehicles – including the hybrids and Toyota – can’t have different temperatures. So the technology today does the following: it looks at the weakest output of the weakest battery and it then drains all the other batteries down to that level because you don’t want any one battery to have a different temperature output or all the whole thing goes up. That’s stupid. You’re wasting all that energy and you only get 245 miles per charge. If we can apply the same Solar Magic technology we think we can get back 50% of that lost power.”
But NatSemi’s Solar Magic is mainly about improving the efficiency of solar panels and by both increasing their life time and decreasing their payback time. I liked Halla’s bird poop analogy!
“The way solar panels are installed, if a bird poops on one of them or you have a little bit of shade on the corner of one of them, you shut down an entire strain. Think about a big maglite with 6 batteries all in serial. If one of those batteries go bad, we all do the exact same thing: we dump out all the batteries and put new ones. But the one battery that went bad is the one that made light go down or shut off. Same for solar panels. If we find with our solar magic technology that one of the panels isn’t performing we electronically take it off line and let the others perform at maximum and find out what that panel can’t do with the bird poop on it and we put it up in line additive to the power.”
“After 10 years the whole array [of solar panels] is 50% efficient. People who reclaim that go in and find out that only 2 or 3 panels are 50% or less efficient and the rest are all good and better than 80% efficiency. People don’t know that and think that there whole array needs to be replaced.”
“Things like this, combined with the cost of panels coming down rapidly, are going to make solar panel efficient equal to coal and oil.”
And the final word on power efficiency
“We’re known in our industry as having the most power efficient circuits, a combination of process technology and circuit design. Our circuits use the least amount of energy and get the most power.”
