Looking back at 2024; looking ahead to 2025! 🚀

Semiconductor Substack IRL, RAN research, longevity book, visits from Detroit to Tottori

(January 12: Edited post-publication - with one more illustrious campus visitor added at the bottom!)

Friends - a belated welcome to 2025! Best wishes for the Year of the Ssssssnake. (Ssssorry. Decades of Dad jokes are hard to shake.)

This is a NorCal newsletter - so here’s some Sonoma Coast sunshine to help set the vibe.

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A warm welcome to new subscribers. Some of you I’ve met; some of you came through

Babbage

or

Semiconductor Business Intelligence

. 🙏 And yes, I do write about semis sometimes! I try to get two posts out per month. Generally, I’ll write on topics related to teaching or research or general Berkeley campus activity, with a bit of a Japan strand throughout. This spring, I’ll be teaching:

• Strategy for the Networked Economy (S4NE): two sections; topics ranges from handsets to network operators to semis to response to disruption and working with platforms.

• Opportunity Recognition: Technology & Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley

For familiar readers, the second topic does mean more Cluster-y oriented teaching (and posts)!

Starting the year off with two big picture-ish thoughts, one related to the US, and one related to Japan.

1. E-commerce is 16% of total retail in the US as of 2024q3. What will society look like when that goes to 25%? 33%?

2. I am fresh back from a week in Japan. The big theme, in our oldest G-7 member - labor shortages. In so many contexts. This is simultaneously opportunity and gating item, again in so, so many contexts.

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Since this is the first post of the year, I’ll share some news:

• My report on Open RAN, to be published by the UC-Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, comes out this month! More to come in this space. I will keep serializing sections of it here.

• This year, I’m starting research on Japan’s investment into revitalizing and protecting its semiconductor industry, in my role as Faculty Fellow at the Berkeley Risk & Security Lab. More to come on this topic.

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With that, here’s a look at the year that was.

• Semiconductor Substack IRL

We had count’em THREE Semiconductor Substack IRL moments on the UC-Berkeley campus in 2024. In chronological order:

1. The Asianometry Newsletter
   meetup in February, co-hosted by the Haas Asia Business Club

2. Chipstrat
   comes to Berkeley SkyDeck - author
   Austin Lyons
   came by our campus accelerator while in town and met with chip track mentor Mark Miller and yours truly. Plus a SkyDeck alumni company. I’ll let
   Austin Lyons
   tell that story when the time comes.

3. D2D Newsletter
   kept a close-to-decade long streak intact by guest speaking in S4NE, yet again, on semiconductor economics.

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• Clusters: transitions and turnarounds

1. My son and I made it to Detroit Homecoming. It was so good. Worth the red-eye. Now to figure out when I’ll get out in 2025.

2. Tottori is working. At the invitation of the Tottori Industrial Promotion Organization, I visited Tottori, Japan’s smallest prefecture by population, and last to get a Starbucks, in May. Director Okamura and team were warm hosts. Tottori is proud of its sand dunes and its views and is open for mobility startups.

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• The vortex campus

1. Hat-tip to Mike Cohen of UC-Berkeley Innovation Ecosystem Development for the term. The vortex campus attracts students, staff and faculty, and then retains them in the surrounding area. Berkeley is slowly but surely becoming one.

2. Berkeley SkyDeck celebrated Executive Director Caroline Winnett’s 10-year anniversary at the helm.

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• Open RAN

I published two posts on Open RAN, with more to come. What’s Open RAN, you ask? RAN = Radio Access Network, i.e., the part of the mobile network operator infrastructure that connects to a subscribers’s phone. The visible part is usually the RU, or Radio Unit. In 2G, we called this a base transceiver station (BTS) or just base station or cell site.

In NorCal our RAN deployments can be subtle.

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• Moments in (electro)mobility

From *pink* illegally parked Cybertrucks (yep, that was a pink Cybertruck in the disabled spot next to the School of Optometry); to lots and lots of Waymos; to after-market electric powertrains for mountain bikes (shout-out to BiMotal); to drones that can emit directed energy (hello, Aurelius), it was a memorable year in mobility.

Waymo broke out in San Francisco. But still can only move on the X and Y-axis, no gadgetmobile extendo-legs just yet.

electromobility in various forms

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• Publications

Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging came out!

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• Japan kept coming to UC-Berkeley

As a statement this can be measured a number of ways, from entrepreneurs coming to SkyDeck (thanks to our friends at JETRO) to visiting scholars to university and corporate visitors. A highlight - hosting a summer entrepreneurship intensive for 20 bright young early-stage entrepreneurs. Below - a moment of joy.

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• It’s a family affair, continued

If Dave Letterman can cast his Mom, and Bill Simmons can cast his Dad…why can’t instructors have family members join class?

And so it was for the second year in a row (both parents came in 2023, as did my nephew later, as an MBA applicant), class became a family affair when my Dad came to class.

Students always

This year, Dad joined a conversation on government and technology markets, and the implications of OSINT, complete with guest speaker from the intelligence community. And, in a wonderful moment of campus serendipity, my Berkeley Law colleague Chris Hoofnagle also joined class on an impromptu basis! (Yes, he was literally walking by as we were talking about OSINT….and the moment was seized.)

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All in all, the year that was packed a lot, and that does not even get into personal and family milestones (20-year wedding anniversary, for example)!

Looking ahead, I’m excited to get back on campus, and to get to Japan (again) for site visits to Chitose, Kumamoto and other areas where Japan is re-catalyzing semiconductor activity.

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Below, some soul jazz. Swiss Movement, recorded in a moment of alchemy in 1969, is an album that has been described as music to get pulled over by.

Onward and upward in 2025! 🚀

Jon