With the latest announcement by Qimonda to build a 12″ DRAM fab in Singapore, the number of 12″ chip fabrication fabs in this small island has surged incredibly to 5. These include Chartered Fab 7, UMC Singapore, TECH Fab2 (owned by Micron), IM Flash (Intel-Micro JV) and Qimonda. In addition, there are another two wafer substrate manufacturing fabs under construction in Singapore, SOITEC and Silitronic/Samsung. One question one might ask is with a mere 4 million population, could Singapore provide sufficient manpower to support all these fabs? Another question is why Qimonda didn’t follow Intel’s footstep and pick China? I am quite sure China will provide many irresistible incentives and freebies to Qimonda. The president and CEO of Qimonda seems to exuberate great confidence in Singapore as expressed in the press release:

In Singapore, we have found excellent conditions. The overall package of low taxation, incentives and factors such as highly skilled labor and strong infrastructure makes Singapore our place of choice to implement our fully-owned volume production in the Asian market.

I think Singapore has one great advantage over other Asian countries, like China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. As an English-speaking global cosmopolitan, it is able to attract workers from all over the world to support its fab activities. For instance, the Chartered team that I work with, none of them is Singaporean. They are either from Korea, Malaysia, China or India. These MNCs can source the workers from all over the world to fill their needs. Furthermore, some MNCs, particularly US and European MNCs, may face technology transfer restriction in China. On the other hand, the local and foreign workers in Singapore are also much more mobile as they have more options now with increasing number of Fabs in Singapore. I guess TECH would face serious talent drain once the Qimonda starts its production.

I find the most amazing thing about the Web is free open source softwares. The power of free open source software is not just because it is free of charge, but the huge collective effort of individuals to develop the software that could beat today best commercial softwares. There is a big supporting community surrounding a free open source software. Each day, some souls out there are continuously improving the software for the sake of making the software better to serve the community. I enjoy throwing my problem, eg installation issue or enquiry about certain features, in the community forum. Usually I can get somebody to lend me a helping hand and give me a generous advise. If you are interested to know the origin of free open source software campaign, please visit the GNU Project. The three most popular free open source softwares for the Web are Apache for web server, php for server scripting and mysql for database.

Sikod is hosted on Yahoo Web Hosting and almost entirely powered by free open source softwares. Besides using the php/mysql as the backbone, most of the stuff in sikod website is powered by other free open source softwares, such as:

1. feed2js - use for converting rss feeds to javascript. That is how you see all the updated news in sikod.
2. phpbb - use in sikod forum
3. Wordpress - use in sikod blog
4. Gregarius - use in sikod rss reader
5. Moodle - use in sikod training courses management

Of course, there are many other excellent free open source softwares to power anything you want, such as e-commerce, content management, blog, wiki, gallery etc. One good place to find free open source software is opensourcecms website. Interestingly, I found that Moodle, a free open source of e-learning management, even goes into the virtual world of Second Life. Watch the video below: