April 2012, One of the most talked about announcements at the NAB 2012 show was the release of the Autodesk Smoke product on the Mac platform for $3495 for a perpetual license with an optional $525/yr for maintenance with updates, in addition to the traditional Unix/Linux version that is still available. The product is being [...]
April 2012 – At the NAB show, Maxon discussed advances being made with their products for motion graphics. Their current product line has enjoyed a 46% growth in 2010 which continued at a 26% WW level in 2011. This growth includes the shift of the Cinema4D tool from scene creation and character sequence creation to [...]
April 2012 – Facilis was showing their multi-platform storage solutions at NAB. The new system the TeraBlock V5.5, supports Mac/Windows/Linux workflows and data storage for most major tools, with a shared file system. The system uses 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Chanel for an interface and can also support 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet. The storage solution [...]
April 26, 2012, GSA Silicon Summit, Mountain View, CA—Chenming Hu from UC Berkeley talked bout the revolutionary scope of multi-gate transistors. He addressed the challenges of cost, speed, and power in the next generation of devices. The biggest issue for many designs is to reduce all facets of power consumption. Scaling is at the heart [...]
April 26, 2012, GSA Silicon Summit, Mountain View, CA—Roawen Chen from Marvell Semiconductor moderated a panel on extending the life of CMOS. Panel members included Jim Aralis from Microsemi, Paul Boudre from Soitec, Shung Chieh from Aptina Imaging, Matt Crowley from Tabula, and Pushkar Ranade from SuVolta. Chen noted that the topic has been around [...]
April 26, 2012, GSA Silicon Summit, Mountain View, Ca—Joel Hartmann from ST Microelectronics talked about the need for SOI technologies. This established technology will enable innovation and influence the ecosystem in mobile, data, and consumer applications. As media converge ; TV, STB, cloud, multi-screen, apps, etc. the primary issue is power. The majority of devices [...]
April 2012 – Las Vegas, NV – Xilinx had three major themes for the NAB show this year – (1) display targeted solutions for high resolution, (2) source code availability for thier real time solutions, and (3) a video over IP solution. The display technology was shown based on the new kintex7 FPGA. Using a [...]
March 2012 – We recently tested the SanDisk Extreme 240GB SSD for the commerical marketplace. This drive has a SATA III (6Gbps) interface and features SanDisk’s 24nm Flash cells as the core memory. This is a desktop and oriented drive that come in an eco freindly minimalist package without the mounting bracket, SATA cable, or [...]
March 2012 – Samsung has recently introduced their new consumer oriented SATA III (6Gbps) SSD the 830Series. This is a desktop and oriented drive that come with the mounting bracket, SATA cable, power cable, and software. The current kit includes both the Samsung SSD software and a copy of Norton Ghost to aid with drive [...]
April 26, 2012, GSA Silicon Summit, Mountain View, CA—Subramanian Iyer from IBM looked the issues to “Keeping Moore’s Law Alive” in his presentation at the Computer History Museum, a fitting place for a technology forecast. From an IDM perspective, the primary questions are: is there a problem, what to do about scaling, and what are [...]
