Electronics has transformed societies around the globe, but todays it's hit its worst rough patch ever. Design starts are down as a low as morale and the view toward recovery is hazy. We decided to try to clear away some of that haze by talking with the leading executives of the industry, the heirs to the Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett legacy. We're sitting down with CxOs for in-depth interviews to discuss the future of the technology and its business and to get the View from C-Level.—Brian Fuller, Editor in Chief

Wilf Corrigan is the principal founder of LSI Logic and has served as chairman and CEO since its organization in January 1981. Prior to founding LSI Logic, Corrigan was president, chairman and chief executive officer of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation.

Dreamed of being an engineer. Had enough focus in his teens to charge through Union College to grab that BSEE. Walked out of college and into Texas Instruments. Twenty-four years later, he was named chief executive officer. That's Rich Templeton, one of the new, younger breed of chief executives populating the corner offices in electronics companies. Check out Templeton's view of the future.

Boyish good looks. Ready smile and a quick story. Hair's not too gray. So how has National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla managed it all? Maybe because he predicted the recovery. He's been both celebrated by analysts and pilloried by them in his time at National Semiconductor, but the onetime Intel, onetime LSI Logic executive is not shy about taking risks and taking the heat when things go south or spreading the praise when they go north. Hear what "Nostradamus" Halla has to say about the industry's recovery.

When Fred Weber was about to graduate from Harvard College's physics program in 1985, one of his professors, Ugo Gagliardi, urged him to "call Gordon Bell." Weber, now chief technology officer at Advanced Micro Devices, quotes Gagliardi as having told him, "Whatever Gordon Bell is doing is what you should be doing." Weber heeded the advice, moving to >Bell's startup, Encore. Since then, Weber's career has moved steadily upward as he's leveraged a background in supercomputing techniques into some of the most sophisticated processors in the world--AMD's. He acknowledges, too, that he owes a lot of his view of the world to his work in college in the theater.

There are a number of word-associations one can make with T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor: Outrageous. Outspoken. Outlandish. Nuns. Wine. Vicar of VMOS. Rodgers has been intense since his childhood in Wisconsin. Rodgers was a double major in physics and chemistry at Dartmouth. He attended Stanford University on a Hertz fellowship, earning a master's degree (1973) and a Ph.D. (1975) in electrical engineering. He worked at AMI and AMD before founding Cypress in 1982. He is one of the most outspoken executives in the Valley, but has a unique ability to talk not only at the 60,000-foot level but at the nano-level as well.

Wim Roelandts wasn't your prototypical kid growing up in Belgium, putting playing cards in his bicycle spokes or pulling wings off flies. He spent his youth pulling apart TV sets in his father's garage and got the electronics bug. He spent the first half of his career at Hewlett-Packard where he rose through the ranks to run the company's highly successful workstation and RISC business in the early 1990s. But then Bernie Vonderschmitt, Xilinx founder and a guy who helped invent the same color TVs Wim pulled apart as a kid, came calling. A system guy brought in to run a semiconductor company? It was exactly the right move to help an FPGA vendor grow into the increasing complex system-on-chip era.

John Daane spent his summers in the Silicon Valley working at his father's electronics store in an age when the orchards utnumbered the high-tech campuses. He spent his formative years in semiconductors at LSI Logic, where he was considered at one point the heir apparent to LSI Chairman Wilf Corrigan. But Daane shocked the industry when he jumped to the CEO's office at programmable logic maker Altera Corp. He sits in a unique position with a keen view of the ASIC world as he drives Altera into new segments and applications.

Our first interview is with Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of design automation firm Mentor Graphics. Rhines spent the first half of his career with Texas Instruments running its semiconductor businesses and now sits on the other side of the fence in the tools world, where the former Mentor customer is navigating his company through tricky economic and technology times.