Poor little Qualcomm: $100 billion in market cap but nobody knows your name. At least that’s the song the company is singing in a new MIT Technology Review article today, which features Qualcomm Chief Marketing Officer Anand Chandrasekher basically begging for attention. Qualcomm is the Intel of the mobile world, after all, but without garish stickers on every PC, a two-word catchy slogan and… → Read More
Warren East, the executive who has seen UK semiconductor juggernaut ARM Holdings through some of its most explosive growth, fuelled by deals with companies like Apple for its iPhone and iPad devices, is stepping down from his job and retiring, the company said today. He is being replaced by insider Simon Segars, who is currently president of ARM. East had been with the company since 1994. The… → Read More
Earlier this week European Commissioner Neelie Kroes spoke in platitudes about how the EU would be putting more effort into kick-starting the region’s hardware industry — to create the ‘Airbus of chips.’ Her words seem particularly ironic (and possibly more empty) today, as the world’s largest telecoms company, Ericsson, admitted it would have to take a writedown of $1.2 billion (8 billion… → Read More
Apple is reportedly looking into ways to replace its Intel processors in Macs with new chips based on the designs it uses for its iOS-based devices. The company has previously been rumored to be contemplating such a move, but Bloomberg reports today that Apple’s engineers are now more confident in their underlying chip designs and their ability to power Mac desktops and notebooks. → Read More
The iPhone 5 brings a lot to the table, but a lot of its changes lie under the hood away from prying eyes. Or, at least, away from those eyes until Friday when it’ll get opened up by a host of folks, including iFixit.com’s perennial new Apple hardware tear-down. The iPhone 5 has already given up maybe its greatest secret, however: A custom-designed A6 system-on-a-chip that represents the… → Read More
Samsung Electronics has been knocked hard on mobile phone design innovation in the last few days, but in what might be a spectacular display of diversionary tactics, it is also doubling down on another significant part of its business — chipmaking. Today, the Dutch semiconductor machine maker ASML announced that Samsung would be investing close to $1 billion — yes, more or less the same amount… → Read More
ARM Holdings — supplier of microchips for Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, Samsung’s Galaxy line and soon technology for Microsoft’s Windows 8 devices — continues to report strong results while riding the wireless device boom and expanding to newer areas. The company reported Q2 earnings (ended June 30) of £135.5 million ($213 million), beating analyst estimates of $206 million. Net profit was… → Read More
Big news from Asia’s mobile market today: Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (55 million customers, over US$50 billion in sales per year) is teaming up with five other tech powerhouses to develop chips for next-generation mobile devices. Docomo’s partners are NEC, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd., Panasonic, and Samsung.
The goal is to use synergies in the six companies’ expertise in… → Read More
NEC and a researcher from Japan’s Tohoku University, Professor Hideo Ohno, are working on a power chip that solves a pretty big problem: completely eliminating electricity consumption of electronic devices that are in standby mode. The key piece of technology here is CAM, the world’s first content addressable memory. → Read More
The consolidation in Japan’s electronics industry continues: Sony just announced it has bought a chip manufacturing facility in Nagasaki Prefecture, western Japan, from Toshiba. The deal is supposed to be closed by April 1 this year and is worth $650 million. → Read More
If you look at the batches of new cell phones Japan’s leading mobile carriers have been presenting in recent months, you’ll notice the high-quality cameras some of the models have. And now major Japanese chip maker Renesas (which merged with NEC last year) is even promising [JP] 16MP cameras in future handsets. → Read More
Toshiba seems to be determined to completely overhaul its semiconductor segment. Yesterday, it was reported that Sony will buy back a semiconductor plant it sold to Toshiba two years ago for $600 million. And today, Toshiba itself said it is ready for a second step: the company is in talks with Samsung to farm out the production of LSI chips to its Korean rival. → Read More
Not content at owning 100% of the world’s brand awareness, Apple is looking into building its own chipset and has even hired a team to work on “multifunction” mobile chips.
In the cellphone world, a chip is a chip. Most of them are ARM-based but there are a few outliers. Most importantly, however, each has a similar power profile. Therefore, by controlling the entire chip themselves, Apple can… → Read More
As we well know, Tony Fadell, the former exec in charge of Apple’s iPod division, has stepped down for personal reasons and Apple has hired Mark Papermaster, the PowerPC chip guru in IBM’s hardware business. We’ve been discussing the move and there are a few reasons for choosing someone from IBM to lead what is, in reality, an entertainment division. First, iPods are now… → Read More
NEC Electronics today announced in Japan [JP] they managed to develop a technology which could lead to chips used for wireless applications that are 10% smaller than existing products. NEC is planning to use the new chips for indoor wireless communication under gigahertz-band frequencies and miliwave and UWB protocols. The company coats their chips with a ferrite layer that boosts the magnetic… → Read More
Well! IBM and AMD are certainly proud of themselves today! They’ve been working on a 22nm SRAM cell, two generations ahead of the current 45nm process. The devices developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) were built in a traditional six-transistor design on a 300 mm wafer and had a memory cell… → Read More
Trouble ahead, captain! Before ten years is out, our pattern of reducing the size of semiconductors (for example, the move to 45nm from 65nm with Penryn) every two years or so is going to hit a brick wall. In a few more shrinks, we’ll be approaching 10nm, at which point quantum mechanics begin to take over and reality gets all wobbly. So what’s next? IBM’s chief technologist says… → Read More
Chips these days are pretty much flat. And I’m not talking about tortilla chips. They call those silicon things wafers for a reason: all those little gates and channels are lying flat in a single layer. Chipmakers know that you can stack chips on top of each other and multiply your computing power due to the decreased distance the signal has to travel (I’m kind of at the edge of my… → Read More
Aim well, my friend Instructables has a detailed discussion on how to disable an RFID tag in a passport or other radio-enabled item. The bottom line? Smash the bugger with a hammer. -The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence… → Read More
AMD today finally updated its Phenom chips from dual-core to triple-core, as has been rumored for weeks. The new chips have clock speeds between 2.1GHz and 2.4, 1.5MB front-side cache, and AMD’s HyperTransport at 3600Mhz. Pricing starts at around $145 in large orders. The 3-core chips are unusual and bridge the gap between current 2-core chips and the more expensive 4-core chips. It’s… → Read More
If you’re going to be building super popular phones and digital media players, why not use all your own parts, right? That’s Apple’s thinking, apparently, as Forbes has uncovered a recent deal to purchase a fabless semiconductor company called P.A. Semi to the tune of some $278 million, according to sources inside Apple. The decision to center the iPhone design around a chip that… → Read More
If you’re near avians or their flu, take a look at STMicro’s new bird flu virus detectors. The chip can differentiate human strains of the Influenza A and B viruses, drug-resistant strains and mutated variants, including the Avian Flu or H5N1 strain. As we all know, only 236 folks have died of bird flu but that doesn’t stop us all from going nuts and aiming all our guns at a flu… → Read More
Ever wonder what was inside your Eye-Fi card? No? Well, Ikontools opened one up to tell you. It basically contains the Atheros radio-on-chip, some Samsung flash, and a whole lot of suck because you can’t take pictures of any quality and be sure they’ll ever upload automatically over Wi-Fi, one of the things the Eye-Fi was supposed to do seamlessly. Honestly, I had high hopes for the… → Read More
[photopress:dlp_ti_mobile_projector_1.jpg,full,center] Texas Instruments is getting hardcore about supporting next-gen cellphone video, unveiling a duo of chips that could allow cellphones to record and project high-def content. Microprojecting is the next logical step for portable digital video. Sure, the Nokia 810s and iPod Touches of the world look great, but they’re personal players. → Read More
An industry group comprised of IBM, AMD, Samsung, and a few various semiconductor companies has just initiated Toshiba into their club, which has been formed to "work through 2010 to design, develop and produce chips using tiny circuitry." Toshiba had to drink a gallon of beer in under a minute and then do the elephant walk with all the other companies. Other secret initiation rituals… → Read More
Attention, ladies of Seattle: If you’re walking around wearing these, and I see you, we’re getting married right then and right there. Computer chip hair clips! [Etsy, via 7 Gadgets, via Shiny Shiny] → Read More
Laptop mid-giant, Toshiba, will start using AMD chips in their laptops, a move that essentially dumps their long-standing relationship with large-giant Intel. They expect to put AMD chips into 20 percent of their new models. Reuters points out that Dell recently took up AMD as a supplier after being Intel-only for twenty years. The new Toshiba models should sell at about $100 less than similarly… → Read More
While most of us are at the height of the giving feeling this holiday season, some crooks out of Silicon Valley are more interested in taking. In a clever heist straight out of CHiPs ’07, a gang of thieves made off with $190,000 in microchips and a Mazda using a modified crash-and-dash scheme to not only collect the loot, but make a getaway as well. The Mazda MPV was trasporting 100,000… → Read More
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