TCL bursting out of China

Kimberly Allen, the China Daily, agencies

At tea time in a phone factory in the southern Chinese city of Huizhou, and hundreds of employees are taking a break from assembling cellular handsets for one of China's hottest electronics companies, TCL Corp. Some of the workers gather next to the windows and chat. Others simply put down their heads and nap at their assembly-line spots. A few stand watching a brave soul with a karaoke machine belt out an off-key tune. It's a rare moment of frivolity: Executives cite TCL's hard-driving culture as one of the reasons the outfit is a top producer of consumer electronics in China. Tomson Li, TCL's chairman and chief executive officer, boasts of the long hours his employees put in.
   TCL's rivals worldwide would do well to heed that warning. The company's TVs, DVD players, PCs, and other gadgets have made it one of the most prominent Chinese brands. Now, TCL is looking to become a global player. TCL announced it was forming a joint venture with French electronics maker Thomson to create one of the world's largest producers of televisions.
   
   Power partners
   For TCL, Thomson's brand names -- which include RCA and Thomson -- and its market presence were the keys to the deal. Through its sales operations in Europe and the U.S., Thomson sold 7.4 million TVs in a year. TCL wants to use that network to extend its own reach. Last year, TCL earned $180 million on sales of $3.8 billion, with earnings up 110 per cent and revenues up 51 per cent, compared with 2001.
   More than 70 per cent of its sales are inside China, where TCL is one of the top names in electronics. Its cell phones, which the company only started to build a few years ago, are the second-biggest seller in the world's largest mobile-phone market. TCL's strategic investors include Toshiba and Philips; its technology partners include Microsoft and Intel.
   The Thomson joint venture is one of several deals that TCL's entrepreneurial management is pushing. The 49-year-old Li, who founded the company as a producer of cassette tapes in 1981, says Chinese companies must take advantage of their low-cost manufacturing base and immense home market to become world players. "In consumer electronics, Chinese enterprises will be the next major supplier," explains Li. "So TCL should grab this opportunity."
   For its part, Thomson was just bowing to the inevitable. As recently as 1996, Thomson, then owned by the French government, was so awash in red ink that Paris considered giving it away to South Korean conglomerate Daewoo Corp. for a symbolic one franc. Since then, Thomson has privatised and moved into the more profitable business of providing digital movies to Hollywood through its Technicolor subsidiaryTCL will own two-thirds of the joint venture, which will combine the pair's TV and DVD-player assets, worth about $517 million.
   China, of course, already is the leading location for low-cost electronics manufacturing. Now the Chinese want to play in the big leagues. Just as Japan in the 1960s produced Sony Corp. and Korea in the '80s produced Samsung Group, TCL executives are betting that China will soon produce a global giant in consumer electronics. "We are determined to become the Chinese Sony or Samsung," says Vincent Yan, TCL International chief financial officer.
   That might seem a bit far-fetched right now. For all of Sony's recent woes, it still has $62 billion in sales, while Samsung boasts $33.8 billion. TCL is small by comparison. But with China home to more cell-phone users than anywhere else on earth, not to mention consumers of millions and millions of PCs and DVD players, companies like TCL enjoy a tremendous home-field advantage that could help them narrow the gap.
   TCL has another edge: It is far more entrepreneurial than other Chinese companies with global ambitions. Its Huizhou headquarters is in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, home to many of China's most dynamic businesses. Li may have heavy government backing -- the city of Huizhou is the biggest shareholder in TCL -- but he still runs the company more like a startup, says H.C. Ho, president and CEO of Sampo Group, a Taiwanese consumer-electronics maker and TCL rival.
   Winning control of Thomson's TV business fits with Li's strategy of using existing brands to penetrate Western markets. While other Chinese companies aim to introduce their own names overseas, TCL execs say they don't want to spend the huge sums required to persuade skeptical Western consumers to try out a new brand. In Europe and North America, the strategy is to find distressed brands like Thomson's RCA, once part of General Electric Co. TCL last year bought the assets of Schneider Electronics, a bankrupt German company, and took control of GoVideo, a small producer of DVD players and VCRs in Scottsdale, Ariz.
   TCL's biggest design coup had nothing to do with technology. Shortly after launching its cellular business in 2000, it unveiled a model encrusted with jewels. It was an immediate best-seller.
   As they push TCL farther beyond China's shores, Li and his team are taking some big risks. While the company looks to Sony as a role model, Sony itself is struggling. The electronics business has gotten tougher, in part because Chinese factories transform just about everything into a low-cost commodity. TCL is diversifying into PCs -- it recently bought control of Chinese notebook-computer maker Beijing Youbang Online -- even though few companies other than Dell Inc. (DELL ) are managing to make solid profits from the PC business.
   And in its eagerness to go abroad, TCL may have given away too much to Thomson. TCL also faces political obstacles, given that its worldwide debut comes when manufacturing jobs in the West are heading to China and U.S. politicians and manufacturers are criticising Beijing.
   Yet TCL execs say they have little choice but to keep looking overseas. The Chinese market for TVs, DVD players, and cell phones is intensely competitive. Profit margins are thin and getting thinner. The price wars in China are "brutal," says CFO Yan: "We don't want to compete this way forever."
   
   China's buying spree
   Wall Street firms love deep-pocketed corporate clients eager to make splashy deals. Right now, that means Wall Street loves China, where companies are cash rich and often enjoy low-cost (or no-cost) financing from state-controlled banks.
   In the past few years, wrote Doug Kanter, Chinese firms emerged as major players in a handful of big deals, including Lenovo Group Ltd.'s purchase of International Business Machines Corp.'s personal computer business, oil company Cnooc Ltd.'s bid for Unocal Corp., and appliance maker Haier Group's play for Maytag Corp.
   Lenovo Group Ltd. Chairman Liu Chuanzhi, left, and IBM Senior Vice President John Joyce hold copies of the agreement divesting IBM's PC unit to Lenovo.
   China has stepped up its interest in owning foreign companies.
   Some key transactions are as follows. In November 2002 China Netcom paid $1 billion for the Asian subsidiary of bankrupt U.S. telecom company Global Crossing Ltd. In May 2005 Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd. Completed $1.75 billion purchase of International Business Machines Corp.'s PC division.
   In November 2003: Chinese electronics maker TCL Corp. and France's Thomson SA agreed to combine their television and DVD manufacturing businesses. The joint venture becomes the world's largest TV maker and includes the RCA and GE brands.
   In June 2005 a consortium of investors led by Haier Group, China's largest appliance company, acquired Maytag Corp. for $1.3 billion. In July 2004 Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corp. acquired South Korea's No. 4 automaker, Ssangyong Motor Co.
   Chinese oil companies have spent more than $5 billion in oil and gas fields worldwide, including oil sands development in Canada. In June 2005 state-controlled oil producer Cnooc Ltd. launched bid to buy U.S. oil company Unocal Corp.

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Joey Tuttle

Introduced three decades ago, the 5100 was IBM's first personal computer (six years before the PC!). The 5100 has an integral CRT display, keyboard, and tape drive. It was available with APL, BASIC, or both, and with 16, 32, 48, or 64 Kbytes of RAM.
   
   Display
   The 5100 has an internal CRT (five inch diagonal) which displays 16 lines of 64 characters. Because the characters are so small, IBM provided a three-position switch to allow the user to select the display of all 64 characters of each line, or only the left or right 32 characters (interspersed with spaces).
   Normally the display is generated from the buffer in main memory at addresses 0x0200..0x05ff. There is a front-panel switch which makes the unit display the first 512 bytes of main memory (addresses 0x0000..0x01ff) in hexadecimal for diagnostic purposes, mainly to observe the processor registers.
   Mass storage was provided by a quarter-inch cartridge tape drive using DC300 cartridges to store 204 Kbytes. Tapes were written in 512-byte records. There are several file types including BASIC programs, APL workspaces, and data.
   
   Software
   On a 5100 with both languages, the user's choice of language is selected by a toggle switch on the front panel!
   Instead of being written in the native microcode instruction set of the processor, the 5100's language interpreters are written for more sophisticated "virtual machines", and the microcode emulates those machines. This was done in order to economize on the amount of ROS needed to implement the language interpreters, and perhaps to speed the product development. The APL microcode emulates a subset of the System/360 instruction set, while the BASIC microcode emulates the System/3.2.
   The APL interpreter was derived from APLSV.
   Hardware logic
   Most of the logic circuitry in the 5100 is built using a TTL-compatible 134-gate bipolar gate array technology called "Dutchess". Each chip has 60 three input NAND gates, 40 four-input NAND gates, and 34 two-input NOR off-chip drivers. The gate propogation delay times are about 10 ns. The chips are packaged in square metal cans.
   
   Processor
   The 5100 uses a board-level microprocessor1 called "PALM" (for "Put All Logic in Microcode"), generally referred to as the "controller" in IBM documentation. The board contains thirteen of the square metal-can packages, along with three conventional DIP-packaged parts and one round metal can part.
   PALM uses 16-bit vertical microinstructions. The average microinstruction execution time is 1.75 µs.
   Microinstructions can directly reference sixteen 16-bit general-purpose registers. Register zero is the microinstruction pointer, also known as the program counter. There are four banks of registers, one bank per interrupt level, for very fast interrupt context switching. The four banks of registers are also addressable as the first 128 bytes of RAM. (The first 128 bytes of the actual RAM cards is not available.)
   There are three interrupts, so there are four processor levels, 0-3, with level 0 executing when no interrupt is pending. Since each level has its own program counter, there is no concept of an interrupt vector. The processor will remain at a given level as long as the hardware interrupt request for that level is active (and no higher-level request is active). Interrupt handlers are thus normally written as loops.
   The ALU is eight bits wide. Despite the fact that the registers are 16 bits wide, PALM provides few 16-bit arithmetic or logical operations. However, some 8-bit operations may cause a carry or borrow from the high byte of a register.
   The processor has a 16-bit address bus. The memory is byte-addressable, for a maximum directly-addressable capacity of 64 Kbytes. Each byte of memory has a parity bit, so the memory data busses are 18 bits.
   Branches can be effected any instruction which writes or alters register zero. One particularly interesting trick allows the creation of a single-instruction infinite loop by clearing register zero. In this case, register zero serves both as the program counter, and as the instruction word pointed to by the program counter. An all zeros word decodes as an instruction to subtract two from register zero. After the instruction is fetched, the PC is incremented by two, then the instruction subtracts two from it again, leaving it at zero. This single-instruction loop technique was used when code running at level zero (non-interrupt) needed to wait for an interrupt to be serviced. The interrupt handler would then write a new value to location zero, which is NOT the interrupt handler's PC, since the handler is running at a non-zero level. Once the hardware interrupt is cleared, level zero gets control again starting from the new PC value.
   
   Display controller
   The display controller is the only 5100 device to use Direct Memory Access (DMA), which IBM refers to as "cycle-stealing". The display is memory mapped. Microcode can disable the display during calculations in order to make more memory bandwidth available to the processor.

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Guru of impossible engineering
creates a car

Jessie Scanlon

What would happen if an architect renowned for his unruly, twisted-metal structures decided to craft a new kind of automobile? We're about to find out. Architect Frank Gehry is in a cardboard chair of his own design. Gehry is collaborating with a group of MIT students to make a new type of concept car. The colourful wood-block models behind him were built by one of the students.
   Gehry's work is enabled by a software tool known as CATIA, which stands for "computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application." Gehry discovered it while experiencing a frustrating false start on the Disney Concert Hall, which he first designed in 1990. The hall's curved facades seem almost tame post-Bilbao, but back then, such warped structures had never been realized. Gehry was trusted to serve only as the design architect at the time; an executive architect was hired to translate his two-dimensional designs into detailed construction documents. Based on those documents, which did not accurately represent Gehry's plan, projected construction costs spiraled out of control, and in 1994 the client balked. In the meantime, Gehry's partner Jim Glymph had joined the firm and, exploring ways for Gehry to better document his designs in three dimensions, found CATIA.
   The program was originally developed in France by Dassault Systèmes to assist aerospace engineers in building complex curved shapes. Although CATIA is now the industry standard for auto engineers, it is not generally used by their colleagues in the design department. That's because the software's strength is in making fine mechanical and engineering adjustments; it doesn't allow for intuitive sketching and image-driven studies. CATIA is a parametric system: The relationships among components are built into the model. When a designer makes a change, all the other components that are affected by that change are adjusted automatically in a sort of ripple effect-the axles lengthen, for instance, when the car gets wider. The software can also simulate the behavior of various materials under stress.
   Gehry still starts his design work by making sketches and physical models. But as the building's form solidifies, those prototypes are digitized and converted into CATIA models. This gives Gehry unprecedented control over not only design but construction: Contractors download the CATIA models directly into milling machines, laser cutters and other computer-controlled manufacturing equipment.
   The hope is that Gehry's tech-assisted daring will yield a car that's as fresh and surprising as his buildings. But the goal is not a Bilbao on wheels. The car's engineering is being developed by a team of MIT students-from the Media Lab and the school of architecture, along with one stray neurobiology postdoc. They are looking beyond aesthetics to features such as novel chassis designs, new suspension systems, alternatives to the seatbelt, and hubless wheels.
   GM has collaborated with several unlikely designers in recent years. In 1992 the company unveiled the 1,400-pound Ultralite concept, developed with aviation pioneer Burt Rutan. The innovative aluminum structure of last year's Cadillac Sixteen was built in partnership with Alcoa. And the sporty Hummer H3T was created with help from Nike.
   Two years ago, Frank O. Gehry strapped himself into the driver's seat of a V8 Dodge Dakota pickup with bald rear tires and drove onto a skid pad at the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in Monterey, California. It was a clear day, but the pad's surface was wet, and within seconds he was sliding out of control-which was the point. Gehry-the world-renowned architect of the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles-had come to this Skip Barber Racing School along with a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn the tricks of the pros: skid recovery, heel-and-toe downshifting and the advanced braking techniques of Formula 1 drivers.
   "It was scary," the 75-year-old architect says of the 110-octane weekend. But he wasn't there for the adrenaline rush. He was there to research a new project: building an automobile. Gehry is collaborating with the MIT Media Lab to design a concept car unlike anything Detroit would produce by itself.
   The idea is to leverage the Media Lab's knowledge of advanced technologies and Gehry's knack for building the impossible to produce a vehicle that challenges the conventional wisdom of how a car is designed and what it can do. General Motors, a Media Lab sponsor, has signed on to provide technical support.
   Ever since Harley Earl, GM's first design chief, unveiled the company's earliest concept cars-including the LeSabre of 1951, with its fully automatic convertible top-the industry has used show cars to hint at the future. But prophesies can be wrong. In hindsight, the bold vision of the 1956 Firebird II-a turbine-powered, titanium-skinned prototype engineered for the automated highways of tomorrow-showed a naive optimism. "If you go too far out, you lose credibility," admits Wayne K. Cherry, who recently retired as GM's vice president of design but is on contract to see this project through. "But if you don't go far enough, then why bother?"
   Gehry frees walls the way Jackson Pollock freed paint. His swirling, curvilinear forms pushed the technical boundaries of 20th-century architecture and forced steelworkers, roofers and others to reinvent their crafts. Seen from the surrounding hillside, the Guggenheim Bilbao unfurls in metallic waves; closer up, you can see the 0.38- millimeter-thick sheets of titanium almost flutter. Some observers have called it the first building of the 21st century. More recently, Gehry has earned headlines for the steel-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall and for MIT's Stata Center, with its tilted brick towers and crumpled metal.
   An unconventional approach to materials has defined Gehry's career, yet it has also earned him derision, especially in the early years, when he experimented with chain link and plywood. "Being accepted isn't everything," he once said. His reputation grew, and in 1989 he won the Pritzker Prize-the Nobel of architecture-though it was the 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao that brought him worldwide celebrity.

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