SAN FRANCISCO — National Semiconductor chief executive Brian Halla is sticking by his prediction that the semiconductor turn-around is here as of 2:15 p.m. PDT June 21—give or take a few minutes.
"I'm having a party, 150 people, to celebrate the recovery. We've got a disk jockey and a PA system," Halla said in an interview with EE Times.
Halla, in his Comdex keynote address last November, predicted the time and date of the recovery. At the end of his speech, he said that if it turns out to be right, it'll be known as Halla's Harmonic. Kidding with Mike Polacek, vice president of National's imaging business, he said "If I'm wrong this will be known as Polacek's prognostication."
Halla based his Nostradamus view on a complex model generated by Stanford professor Amad Bahai, which took into consideration a possible war with Iraq. Bahai used certain algorithms and neural network techniques to work data from the Semiconductor Industry Association to come up with the date.
"Amad came into my office four months ago, and he says 'I know we factored in the war in Iraq, but this SARS thing we never thought about. We should extend this by three months,'" Halla recalled. "I said absolutely not."
Halla pointed out that the World Health Organization has said that the SARS outbreak appears contained. "I had our guy from Hong Kong to dinner the other night. He said three weeks ago it was a ghost town but it's changed dramatically in the last week," Halla said. "Then I accidentally drank out of his water glass. True story. I haven't told my wife."
Agreement elsewhere
Although it may not feel like it, Halla may be right. Most forecasting houses are looking at solid single-digit growth for semiconductors this year, even though many have scaled back earlier forecasts drastically.
"It appears the bottom has hit, and we're in a very modest recovery. We're looking 8.3 percent (semiconductor) growth for the year," said Bryan Lewis, analyst with Gartner-Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.) "You see strength on a temporary basis. We're seeing positive quarters, but we haven't seen the story that says things have flat-out turned."
The eternally optimistic Halla is bullish about the business longterm. Asia is a huge growth area, where National's PC notebook-related business is up 4 percent because of increased content in temperature sensors and similar analog and mixed-signal devices.
"We're getting these orders for watches from Fossil for the Christmas build. This could be huge—people who want access to the Internet any time anywhere," Halla said. Electronics-laden capsules that patients can swallow for medical-imaging purposes have a potential upside of roughly 400 million units, Halla added.
"I'm very confident this too shall pass," Halla said. "And if it's not 2:15 Saturday, it'll be 3:30."
