Japan’s Toshiba Corp (6502.T) is in talks with Singapore’s Chartered Semiconductor (CSMF.SI) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.N) spinoff Globalfoundries about outsourcing some production of next-generation 28-nanometre chips, two company sources said today.
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Today, at the Hot Chips technical conference, Intel architect Rajesh Patel presented a technical overview of Intel’s next generation handheld platform, codenamed Moorestown, and targeted at the MID and smartphone market segments. Specifically, Patel discussed some of the unique innovations in Lincroft around high performance and low power. Lincroft is a SoC in Moorestown that integrates a 45nm Intel Atom processor core, graphics and video engines, as well as memory and display controllers. View the backgrounder for more information.
With chip makers such as IBM and Intel aiming to shrink the manufacturing process to 22 nanometers and smaller, the push is on to develop ways to improve performance and energy efficiency. Scientists with IBM Research and the California Institute of Technology are working on ways to use DNA molecules as the basis for building tiny circuit boards. As shown in these images from IBM Research, the DNA can be put into various shapes and used as a sort of scaffolding, where millions of nanotubes can be deposited onto the sticky DNA and then self-assemble into the precise patterns. IBM scientists say the DNA process can be used to increase performance, speed and energy efficiency in microchips, where feature sizes are 22 nm or smaller, and that these next-generation microprocessors can be less expensive to manufacture.
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A new report by University of California, Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez concludes that income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.The report shows that:Income ineq…
How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year before, at NT$9.16 billion ($277m).
Although no household name, MediaTek makes products used by most consumers in rich countries. The Taiwanese firm is a “fabless” chipmaker, meaning that it only designs its chips, while subcontracting production. It started life in 1997 making chips for CD-ROM drives, and eventually took to building the brains of all sorts of consumer devices. Today MediaTek is the leader in these markets, equipping more than 50% of DVD players, for instance. …
UPDATED: Apple’s new contract with Toshiba, the world’s second-largest supplier of NAND flash processors, should serve as a major boost for the Japanese chip and device manufacturer. Toshiba has been hit hard in its flash business by financial losses in the last two years due to cutthroat price competition with Samsung, the No. 1 flash supplier.
– Apple, maker of
the iPods and iPhones that are sucking up large quantities of NAND flash chips
practically by the minute, announced July 22 that it has entered a long-term
agreement with Toshiba for Toshiba to keep supplying even more of those chips.
Computer and mobile device maker Apple obta…
While performance-improving cache memory gets a lot of attention, there is an increasing need on today’s chips for programmable read-only memory (PROM) as well. This is used to permanently store information for such user-visible features as code storage and on-chip encryption keys, as well as yield-enhancing functions such as cache repair and post-silicon circuit tuning. PROMs rely on electrical fuses for in-factory programming. Salicided polysilicon has traditionally served as a fuse element in several generations of CMOS technologies, but Intel’s recent transition to high-k metal-gate technology requires a significant shift in fuse design to metal fuses. Intel has developed a new metal fuse-based 3-D high-density PROM technology that is fully compatible with high-k metal gate. The new technology has been developed for Intel’s 32nm process, on which it has a 1.37 square micron cell. It is readily scalable for future logic technologies. Details are being described this week at the 2009 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto, Japan.
