Two of my neighbors, both experienced semiconductor marketing guys who had struggled for a full year to find new jobs, are now back at work.

Hiring in central Texas is fairly strong, though most of the jobs are relatively low-wage affairs. My college-age sons picked up summer jobs at restaurants, and one of my daughters also found work, although the pay is low.

Motorola Inc.'s Freescale Semiconductor unit is back in the black, after having lost more than $4 billion during the downturn. Michel Mayer, the IBM Corp. executive who was named CEO at Freescale May 16, won't be spending much time boating on Lake Travis. The Freescale IPO, expected sometime this summer, is likely to be the biggest news of the year in this town. If Mayer can get Freescale's product development engines revved up again, the company should do well. But that's a big if, as Motorola's product cycles in recent years have been as slow as an old Ford.

Plenty of companies are still stalking Motorola for its brightest engineers. Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (San Diego) is setting up an embedded PowerPC products division here and is likely to lure engineers away from Motorola's PowerPC operation. Silicon Laboratories Inc., which acquired microcontroller vendor Cygnal Integrated Products last year, also is cherry-picking Freescale's embedded-processor engineering talent for its Cygnal division.

Texas Instruments Inc. has set up a wireless design center here, and so has Qualcomm Inc.'s CDMA chip operation. That's good news for Austin, which sees wireless as a major growth area.

Not even the most optimistic here believe that growth in high-tech will expand as rapidly as it did in the 1990s. Competition is fierce (look at Dell's battle with HP in personal computers), and the trend toward outsourcing to low-wage countries is not going away.

But the near panic that could be seen in some people's eyes is gone. People are working, restaurants are busy, ski boats ply the waterways, golf courses are getting booked up on the weekends. It may be too hot to fish, but life is good.

David Lammers covers SoC process equipment. Contact him at dlammers@cmp.com.