March 19, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA— Jules Urbach from OTOY and LightStage described some tools that can be used for both cinema and game asset creation. The converging workflows and cloud-based rendering solutions enable designers to take advantage of the increased performance available in the latest hardware. Cloud services are changing the [...]

February 20, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—Image sensors are showing higher performance and embedded intelligence. The ubiquity of imagers in all areas of electronics products is producing advances in adjacent areas like medical and 3-D imaging. A 3.4 uw CMOS sensor from Samsung and University of Michigan includes a feature-extraction algorithm for motion-triggered object-of-interest imaging. The [...]

February 4, 2013, Electronic Imaging Conference, Burlingame, CA—Aude Oliva from MIT described her work in identifying characteristics of memorable pictures. This work is becoming more important as the number of photos spreads across the Internet. The number of images continues to grow, and the social media are accelerating the trend. Some estimates are that 90 [...]

December 2012 – San Francisco, CA – This year the International Electron Device Meeting kicked off with a short course on Circuit and Technology Interaction. Historically, this was held as several sessions in the conference focusing on the new devices for memories, logic and analog operation. With the overall shift to FDSOI and FinFET style [...]

  November 2012 – In a briefing with Spansion, we discussed the release of the industries first 8Gb NOR flash, that has been built on a 45nm process. The part – the Spansion GL-T is a retrofit compliant memory for standard parallel interface NOR Flash of lower densities. The parts are sampling in 2012 and will [...]

November 2012, At this year’s Samsung CIO Conference, held in San Jose, the focus was on the global issues of ubiquitous connectivity through data centers and service providers in an environment that is constrained by the universal resources of power and pollution. The event open with an intro from SJ mayor Chuck Reed who was [...]

September 18, 2012, Memcon, Santa Clara, CA—Scott Graham from Micron offered the hybrid memory cube architecture as a way to address the challenges and memory bottlenecks in high performance systems. The memories and their interfaces are inhibiting the ability for servers to improve throughput performance. Application server performance requires reducing latency for networks, while increasing [...]

We talked with Samsung about their various memory product lines. The constant drivers for changes are the demands for higher performance, higher capacity, and in of growing importance, lower power. The specific product lines we discussed were DDR three, SSD, and mobile memories. At the high performance and of the spectrum, DDR-3 memories are used [...]

HMCC logo October 2011 – Micron and Samsung are the anchor companies in a new technology consortium for a high performance memory structure. The new memory is call the HMC – Hybrid Memory Cube and is being promoted by the HMCC which is the HMC Consortium. Like other technology groups, the HMCC has both development [...]

IBM Blue Gene Q August 24, 2011, Hot Interconnects 19, Santa Clara, CA—Philip Heidelberger from IBM described the interconnection and message unit of the latest IBM supercomputer, Blue Gene Q. This machine is currently a R&D project, but will become the third generation of massively parallel computers for large scale scientific and analytic applications. The [...]