Taking Stock

摘要

I had to find my dictionary the other day. There it was: G-r-o-w-t-h. I hadn't forgotten the meaning; I just wanted to make sure the word still exists. Because growth really appears to be returning to the semiconductor industry, albeit slowly. Altera Corp. (ALTR-Nas-daq) is the latest semiconductor company to report growth in its recent quar- terly earnings report. Altera builds programmable logic, which can be changed during a design or product cycle to let a company modify an existing product. Normal semiconductors, such as Intel microprocessors, have the circuits etched into the various layers of the chip. This means that they're faster but also that mistakes can't be corrected later. As with everything else in life, there's a tradeoff: The drawback with programmable logic devices has always been a higher price per unit and slower performance.