John F “Jack” Gifford once told me that he was a so-so engineer. He
passed away, reportedly from a heart attack, in Mauna Kea Beach (Kauna’oa), Hawaii, aged 68 on Sunday January 11, 2009. He was born and raised in Torrance, California, went to UCLA on a baseball scholarship and got his BEE there. His real metal showed not in engineering but in selling and he worked for both the original Fairchild (whose foundry in South San José is still an EPA
Superfund site), and the original Intersil, and co-founded both AMD and Maxim Integrated Products. He was a tough boss who knew how to squeeze the last cent out of a sale.
Jack, as CEO and Chairman of Maxim, was forced into retirement in 2007, citing health issues, with the SEC investigating him and the then CFO for stock option backdating – hardly a new issue in the Valley. He settled a civil suit with the SEC at the end of 2007 with a cash payment. He left a widow, three daughters, and seven grandchildren.
There are a number of other men who also co-founded analog IC companies in those heady 80s, companies that would never have existed if management of the few that had been around had listened to the moans of the marketplace and its future demands. Many of those men are now around what most of us would consider a normal retirement age and a few have retired, wealthy and with some years left to enjoy expensive hobbies with boats, travel and the like. Some have health problems, which may force them to remain working for insurance reasons; some just cannot let go of what they have built up; at least one, and maybe two, indeed, have been told that they are not wanted at home during the day.
Is there an era about to come to an end? What will the next generation of those leading these companies look like? What technologies will they be using in five, ten years? Is the analog industry going to be able to keep up the fabulous margins that have been the norm?
My feelings are that we are going to see some major changes in the next few years. Distribution is certainly big on that list but there will be others associated with the new management styles (less confrontational, we hope) that are coming into play, pressure from the investment market, and pressure from customers. Process developments are going to be so expensive that perhaps we will see still fewer companies with their own fabs?
But we engineers are simple folk in general. How do I know? This is what Jack Gifford wrote about us in 2004:
Quite honestly, I struggled through school. All it takes to become an engineer is an ordinary person with good character who is aggressive and goal-oriented and wants to get ahead.
No wonder he thought of himself to be a so-so engineer; that description certainly did not apply to me when I took up electronics. How about all of you readers?
Visit our blog and let me know what you think is going to develop in our analog segment of the industry.
