Renesas in Japan Scrambles to Make a Critical Car Chip - NYTimes.com

70 miles northeast of Tokyo, belongs to Renesas Electronics, which supplies about 40 percent of the world market for those crucial chips, known as automobile microcontrollers.

automobile industry has evolved in the digital era, microcontrollers are usually customized for each car model.

Renesas is that it is the product of mergers involving three Japanese semiconductor companies. Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric merged their semiconductor operations in 2003 to form Renesas Technology. Then, last April, Renesas Technology merged with NEC Electronics, the former semiconductor division of NEC, to form the current company, Renesas Electronics.

Renesas’s main competitors include Freescale Semiconductor and STMicroelectronics.

microcontrollers are different in small but important ways,” said Tom Starnes, an analyst at Objective Analysis, a technology research firm. “That makes it very difficult to switch to alternate suppliers, at least not quickly.” Switching could take six months or more, analysts say. …highly customized software that provides instructions for the various chips. From automaker to automaker, “there’s no software compatibility

the long term, automakers will probably spread their bets more to other major suppliers,” said Egil Juliussen, an auto electronics analyst at IHS iSuppli, a research firm. “And there will be more reason to push the industry standardization efforts

Renesas in Japan Scrambles to Make a Critical Car Chip - NYTimes.com

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate | The White House

The White House Blog

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on April 27, 2011 at 08:57 AM EDT

Ed. Note: Read the transcript of the President's remarks following this release or watch the video below:

In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. The state sent the campaign the President’s birth certificate, the same legal documentation provided to all Hawaiians as proof of birth in state, and the campaign immediately posted it on the internet. That birth certificate can be seen here (PDF).

When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the President received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver’s license from the state and the document recognized by the Federal Government and the courts for all legal purposes. That’s because it is the birth certificate. This is not and should not be an open question.

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF):

Click on the photocopy to enlarge: 

Birth certificate-long-form

Correspondence with the Hawaii State Department of Health can be seen here (PDF).

At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue.  The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate | The White House