If IDF Spring 2002 can be viewed as indicator for the state of the global economy in general and the IC industry in particular, it appears that the worst part of the recession is in the past. However, there is no doubt that this was not achieved by simply sitting back and weathering it out, on the contrary, the industry has made an enormous effort to reinact the Münchhausen trick and pull itself by its own hair out of the swamp.

"We have a simple saying at Intel that the only way out of a recession is basically to bring out new products, new technology, new capability and make the end user excited about what you have to offer. And that's exactly where we are today."

Regardless of whether this is conceived as self fulfilling prophecy or a glimpse into the future, the message is clear, roll up your sleeves, get dirty and build up a new, stronger economy and there was not a single exhibitor at IDF who did not follow this strategy.

One of the major differences between IDF and any other tradeshows is the level of perfection and organization that is reflected in the overall layout of the exhibit floor and the selection of exhibitors. Even if Intel's reputation as the crown of the IC industry has somewhat waned, a visit to IDF still conjures up the, er, well intended impression that the entire computer world revolves around Intel. Regardless of which side of the fence one is on, one still must tribute homage to Intel for organizing the most comprehensive showcase layout one could possibly come up with.

To make a long story short, upon entering the floor, the first thing encountered was the Rambus booth as a representative of memory technology showing off their Yellowstone ODR (octal data rate) technology running at as fast as 3.2 Gbit/sec and pin and demonstrating the clean signal properties in the form of luxuritant data Is on the oscilloscope attached to the setup.

Memory technology in form of Rambus' Yellowstone running in demo mode at 3.2 GHz (said without envy) led to the respective chipsets and chipsets led into platforms spreading out thither into the realm of peripherals and interconnects such as USB 1.1, 2.0, IEEE 1394 firewire, Gigabit Ethernet ports and other features as negligible as thermal housekeeping in the shape of high efficiency heatsink designs. Additional features to be seen in the PC of the near future included Serial ATA and wireless communication devices. Needless to say that operating systems like Linux and Microsoft coexisted peacefully during the time of the show, analytical tools like those from FuturePlus systems and Agilent accented the individual corners of the showroom. The hardcore debuggers found a feast in the booths of Windriver and McRaigor showing not only the hardware interfaces but also providing the software to hack into mode register settings and to reconfigure and to debug them if necessary.

And then there were the competition in the form of ServerWorks, and HP (on the chipset level), VIA (USB2.0) and all of it fell together in the exhibits of a few selected vendors like MSI and Tyan. There was still enough room for the outfitters like Molex (sockets and interfaces) and specialty designers (Clearcube) as well as for those companies endorsed by Intel as being a potentially relevant player in their given market segment on the merit of innovation and cost effectiveness. We'll have a few examples of this later. My sincerest apologies to those not mentioned here, there were just too many exhibits to do everyone justice.

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