This time, rather than muse over trends in the industry (the recovery is coming, 300-mm fabs are ramping, etc.), talk about Semicon West (you can check out the show section beginning on page 139), or report on recent travels to facilities or conversations I've had with industry folks (next month I'll get back to that), I'd like to share a couple of tasty nuggets that I've digested recently from elsewhere in the media.

Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Magazine of Innovation," has undergone a significant graphic facelift, added new columnists and departments, and increased its publishing frequency (from 6 to 10 issues per year). As a result, the book (that's what we in the publishing biz call a magazine) has gone from being an occasional-read to a lively must-read. For those in professions encompassing the broad world of microelectronics—from board level to atomic level, wires to fibers, silicon to glass—this year's issues have all included invigorating, thought-provoking copy (that's editor-speak for the stuff we edit or write).

TR's editors like lists, which can be a gimmick in the wrong hands but are enlightening and fun in theirs. In the January/February issue, they had special features on 10 emerging technologies that will change the world and 10 "passed" technologies, and in the May issue they ran a feature about five patents that will transform business and technology. The patents-to-watch article—which included H-P's molecular wire crossbar memory—is accompanied by a pullout chart called "The TR Patent Scorecard 2001." In this feature, corporate patent portfolios are ranked under eight different industry groupings, using a set of criteria developed by the TR staff and CHI Research. Who garnered the top slot in the semiconductor category? Micron Technology, with AMD a rather distant second. TSMC and UMC grabbed fourth and sixth place, respectively, which is indicative of the Taiwanese companies' more-aggressive intellectual property strategies. I suggest you check out www.technologyreview.com, or better yet, get ahold of an actual copy of the magazine (since the cyber-version doesn't do justice to the "real" thing).

The May 29 edition of The Wall Street Journal had a page-one story headlined "Intel Gambles It Can Move Beyond the PC with New Microprocessor." This riveting article details how Intel and its partner Hewlett-Packard developed the just-released Itanium, once code-named Merced, the chip meant to bring Intel a piece of the high-end server market. Many of the inside players are quoted in the piece, and its narrative of fits and starts, failures and successes, fights and truces sometimes sizzles like a good Hollywood screenplay—though I'm not sure floating points and 64-bit architectures can be sexed up.

One of my favorite remarks comes from Intel's John Crawford, where he talks about the early days of collaboration with H-P before the official partnership was finalized. The article says that after the "lawyers worked out some ground rules," technical exchanges began in early 1994. All documents had to stay in the discussion room, an obscure H-P sales office. The materials were locked in a file at the end of each day, with Crawford holding one key, and H-P's Rajiv Gupta the other. Joked Crawford: "The idea was that if we didn't do a deal, we would take the filing cabinet to the parking lot and blow it up."

Sure sounds more fun than just shredding those sensitive documents.