Broadcom licenses Optimode DSP from ARM

LONDON — Fabless communications chip company Broadcom Corp. has extended its relationship with ARM Holdings plc by licensing Optimode data engine technology.
 
Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.), which acquired its own embedded DSP technology by buying Element 14 Ltd. (Cambridge, England), is set to include the ARM (Cambridge, England) embedded signal processing technology into a variety of SoC applications including networking and wireless, ARM said.

Optimode is a configurable VLIW-styled architecture intended for embedded signal processing applications with an associated tool

Consumers Get The Picture On HDTV

U.S. Consumers are expected to put aside their reservations over high-definition television, and spark a 71 percent surge in sales in four years, a market research firm said.

By 2009, HDTV sales are expected to reach $65 billion, as consumers grow less skeptical about the technology, Park Associates said in a recent statement.

Nearly half of all TV households in the United States plan to buy an HDTV in the next 12 months, which is expected to boost sales by

Japan's SoC effort dissolved

TOKYO — Japan's 90-nm joint R&D research company, Advanced SoC Platform Corp. (Aspla), closed up shop and was quietly dissolved on Oct. 7.
Aspla's 300-mm shuttle service, one of its major operations in addition to 90-nm process development, was taken over by Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (Starc).

Aspla was founded in July 2002 by Japan's major semiconductor companies with the mission to develop a standard 90-nm platform for volume production of SoCs using 300-mm wafers. It opened a 300-mm

U.S., European chip makers driving copper interconnects

LONDON — North American and European semiconductors manufacturers are driving the market for front-end equipment tools for copper processing of IC interconnects, rather than their Asian counterparts, according to market research group The Information Network.
According to Robert Castellano, president of the research company, equipment purchases to U.S. IC companies represented 18 percent of the total worldwide front-end market in 2004, yet copper tools were 26 percent of total copper processing equipment purchases.

“In Europe, 9 percent of total front-end

Sales of Handheld Devices Without Voice Plummet

Consumer sales of handheld devices without voice communications slid for the seventh consecutive quarter, a market research firm said Thursday.
Shipments fell in the third quarter 16.9 percent from the same period a year ago to 1.6 million units, International Data Corp. said. Quarter-to-quarter, shipments dropped 8.8 percent.

The reason for the free fall is competition from mobile devices that combine voice communications with many of the traditional functions of a handheld device, such as personal information management, IDC said.

Semico Raises Notebook Forecast

Semico Research expects the notebook PC market to reach sales of $120.3 billion in 2006, up from $95.5 billion in 2005.
Revised estimates put growth for the global notebook market at 60 million units in 2005, up from an earlier forecast of 57.5 million units, Tony Massimini, chief of technology at the Phoenix-based research firm, said Wednesday. "Notebook PCs are expected to remain in demand through 2006, growing 25 percent to about 75 million units," he said.

Boosting forecasts is

EFF Reveals Codes In Xerox Printers Oct. 27, 2005

NEW YORK (AP)--Just because a document from a color laser printer doesn't carry your name doesn't mean no one can trace it back to you, privacy advocates warn.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it has cracked the tracking codes embedded in Xerox Corp.'s DocuColor color laser printers. Such codes are just one way that manufacturers employ technology to help governments fight currency counterfeiting.

"Underground democracy movements ... will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes

U.S. Nuclear Security Unit Dedicates Two IBM Supercomputers

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) dedicated two IBM supercomputers including the BlueGene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Thursday.

The machines are used to run three-dimensional codes to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile to ensure that it remains reliable without testing. NNSA administrator Linton Brooks said the BlueGene/L has performed a record 280.6 trillion operations a second using the Linpack benchmark.

The second supercomputer called Purple is based on an IBM Power5 configuration and is machine-capable of 100

Canon ups scanner forecast in Q3 results

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Canon Inc.’s semiconductor-equipment unit reported sales of 77.2 billion yen ($683 million) in the third quarter, down 17.3 percent from the like period a year ago.

Citing a slowdown in lithography-tool shipments, the unit also posted a profit of 9.2 billion yen ($82 million) in the period, down 9.8 percent from a year ago.

Japan’s Canon shipped 51 scanners in the third quarter, including 28 for semiconductor applications and 23 for flat-panel displays. This beat its

Survey Shows Home Theater Owners Tuning Into Surround Sound

One in three American households had a home theater system by the end of 2004 and most home theaters had surround sound, according to a new survey.

Results of a new survey, released Wednesday, show that consumers are becoming more sound savvy. DTS Inc. and Nielsen Entertainment Research surveyed 2,000 adults and found that 75 percent of home theater owners have true 5.1-channel or greater surround sound.

Seventy-three percent of home theater owners and 76 percent of surround sound owners

Dell Adds Mirroring To Desktops

Dell next month will offer customers the option of adding a second drive to some PCs to automatically mirror data, the Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker said Wednesday.

Dubbed "DataSafe," the $99 option is aimed at consumers and small businesses who want to duplicate critical data -- whether digital photos or important documents -- without having to install a mirror drive and third-party software.

The option adds a second internal 80GB hard drive to Dimension E310, E510, and XPS 400

NEC buys 300-mm line from R&D group

NEC Electronics Inc. on Wednesday (Oct. 26) disclosed that it has purchased a 300-mm wafer prototype production line from a Japanese agency.

NEC bought the fab line that was owned by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and leased by the Advanced SoC Platform Corp. (ASPLA), a research and development group in Japan.

The chip maker disclosed the transaction in its financial results on Wednesday. It posted a loss and said its president and CEO will step

Canon tips fuel cells for printers, cameras

Japan's Canon Inc. said that it has developed a line of fuel cells for use in digital cameras and printers, according to Reuters.
Canon hopes the fuel cells will replace conventional batteries in these consumer products over the next three years.

It has developed three prototypes. One would be used in a printer, while the other is aimed for a digital camera. The smallest is about 1.2- x 1.6-inches for use in mobile devices.

Xbox 90-nm processor in production, says IBM

LONDON — IBM Corp. said that a custom processor designed for the Xbox 360 console is in production at the company's East Fishkill, New York, wafer fab and at a fab belonging to Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore.

The chip includes three 64-bit PowerPC processor cores. Each can support two processing threads simultaneously and operate at clock frequencies of up to 3.2-GHz. The integrated circuit links together 165 million transistors and is being fabricated using IBM's 90 nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) manufacturing process,

Fluidigm opens Singapore's first biochip plant

SINGAPORE — San Francisco-based Fluidigm unveiled a new facility here on Monday (Oct. 24) that will support rising demand for its integrated fluidic circuits (IFCs) and the firm's regional expansion plans.

The 15,000-square-foot facility incorporates research and development and manufacturing operations and marks Fluidigm's first offshore venture, as well as the first biochip fab in Singapore.

Fluidigm Singapore general manager Grace Yow said the facility is expected to begin full manufacturing of the company's TOPAZ screening chips — used by