Letters

Bill Roberts' feature on offshoring ("The Perfect Storm Brews Offshore," March 2004) was excellent. But he failed to tie back the significance of one point that Jaswinder Ahuja of Cadence made early in the article. Although speaking with a unified voice is clearly important for the electronics industry, executives and the individual engineering brains on whom they depend for product development and innovation must agree on what that voice says. It can't simply be senior management's perspective alone.

That said, I doubt that IEEE-USA has the gumption or leadership (and quite possibly the latitude, given its subservient position to the parent global IEEE organization) to corral the energy, fear, frustration and outright anger I see among engineers I talk to.

Michael Kirschner
President, Design Chain Associates, San Francisco, Calif.

I read your feature article on biometrics ("A Market in Search of an Identity," January 2004) with great interest. Generally the image of fingerprint identification in Japan has been rather negative—until NTT DoCoMo started to sell its F505i cellular phone in 2003, with the total number of sales now exceeding one million.

This year DoCoMo introduced a 3G FOMA (Freedom Of Mobile multimedia Access) phone called the F900i, equipped with our AES2500 swipe sensor. As a result of the introduction of a biometrics sensor into consumer appliances, people's awareness about fingerprint identification has increased tremendously.

But, as you pointed out in your article, this industry has just started, and enterprises are taking a wait-and-see attitude as well as questioning why they should install fingerprint sensors on a notebook or a handset, when that costs $6 to $10 extra. That explains why Infineon has given up this business and STMicroelectronics spun off its operation recently.

S. Aratani
Authentec, Yokohama, Japan

In the April 2004 article "Currency Crisis: Yuan or Yawn," the spelling of the Chinese currency name is mangled. It's renminbi, which means "people's currency."

Donald Tang
Broadcom, San Jose, Calif.

After our April 2004 story on structured ASICs ("Structured ASICs Gaining Momentum") went to press, Chip Express changed its name to ChipX.

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