March 14, 2012, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Subi Kargeni from Global Foundries talked about taking the industry to the next level. The only way to move on to the next levels is to work together. The semiconductors are powering the convergence of industries as mobile devices become the next generation of computers. The…
January, 2012 We talked with Sherif Hanna about the release of extensions and upgrades to their touch controller product line. The changes address the areas of noise, resolution, for the larger screen product and a reduced parts count. The division grew from $140M in ’10 to over $300M last year. Now, they are working to…
November 8, 2011, ICCAD, San Jose, CA–Chris Malachowsky from nVidia talked bout the drivers for the next generation of designs. The trends, opportunities, and challenges for the next designs are changing as the definition of the needs and capabilities changes. Everyone is looking at the next generation. College graduates are trying to decide if they…
August 8, 2011, Hot Chips 23, Stanford, CA—Richard Kessler described a MIPS-based multi-core processor that raises the bar for performance/$/Watt. This chip is focused on networking and wireless server functions and has an integrated security engine for cryptographic operation acceleration. It is designed to take advantage of packet and flow parallelism and exhibits linear performance…
August 10, 2011, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Scott Stetzer from STEC proposed storage, system, and network designers need to develop new ideas about when, where and how to use SSDs. Fitting SSD technology to the application layer can bring new value and reduce TCO. Data centers are changing and now have to deal with…
July 11, 2011, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—Serge Biesemans, vice president of process technology at IMEC described dream devices and processes. The next generation devices will not look like today’s CMOS. For a number of years, the industry has been processing semiconductors at ever smaller dimensions, below the wavelength of the exposing light. To make…
May 3, 2011, Multi-Core Expo, San Jose, CA—Roberto Mijat from Freescale Semiconductor described some of the measurements available for evaluating multi-core performance. These measurements are a subset of the EEMBC series of embedded processor benchmarks. The multi-core benchmarks include the taxonomy and terminology for the measurements as well as various benchmark tests for functionality, test…
January 18, 2011, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA—the three keynote speakers—Gary Patton of IBM, Chia Song Hwee of Global Foundries, and Stephen Woo of Samsung Electronics—responded to questions after their presentations at a press lunch. Patton summarized the key points, that 32 and 28 nm production is now on-line. They have integrated hi-K…
January 18, 2011, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Jim Thompson, senior vice president of engineering at Qualcomm noted that mobile is now the biggest platform for communications in all of history. There are over 5 billion subscribers and over 1 billion of these people are on 3G networks. This number on 3G or 4G…
January 7, 2011, CES, Las Vegas—Imagination Technologies is trying to become a full solutions company with the acquisitions of Hellosoft and Caustic. HelloSoft has wireless LAN and multi-function radios as well as connection management software in its portfolio which will enable advanced video-VOIP for 4G phones. The hardware will enable low power, small form-factor video…