A View from C-Level

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.

1. Introduction to the interview, Brian Fuller, EET editor in chief[ WMV | Real Video ]
2. What's your view of where the semiconductor recession? [ WMV | Real Video ]
3. Discuss the company's regional revenue strengths [ WMV | Real Video ]
4. Do you see emergence of design startups abroad as a direct threat to North American design jobs? [ WMV | Real Video ]
5. What applications are going to drive this modest recovery? [ WMV | Real Video ]
6. What is this recession masking? [ WMV | Real Video ]
7. Talk a little about how you view semiconductor consolidation. [ WMV | Real Video ]
8. Tell us how you see how process technology and fab partnerships evolving [ WMV | Real Video ]
9. Do you see a coming consolidation in the foundry business? [ WMV | Real Video ]
10. Talk to us a little about your experience with IBM and low-k. [ WMV | Real Video ]
11. Let's talk about another religious issue: to be or not to be aggressive on 90nm [ WMV | Real Video ]
12. If each decade is about some electronics paradigm, what's this one going to be about? [ WMV | Real Video ]
13. The design paradigm has changed markedly with SoCs. Are engineering students prepared properly by the schools? [ WMV | Real Video ]
14. Conclusion to the interview [ WMV | Real Video ]