Slashdot Mirror

AMD says that the quad cores will have the same thermal footprint as the dual cores, so it should have similar power consumption. See http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?artic leID=192000031

Euro bank notes to embed RFID chips by 2005 http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011219S0016
''RFID Tags'' in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them http://www.rfidbuzz.com/news/2004/rfid_tags_in_new _us_notes_explode_when_you_try_to_microwave_them.h tml

Score another one for http://www.sarbanes-oxley.com/. EETimes.com has been keeping a count of other companies in hot water for back-dating stock option grants at http://www.eetimes.com/scandal.html

Intel has lost billions of dollars since late 90s on this. EE-times gives some more details http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=189602065

During the course of the past decade Intel invested between $3 billion and $5 billion in the assets it sold to Marvell, says Will Strauss, an analyst for Forward Concepts. Intel spent nearly $2 billion on a single acquisition to bolster those communications chip efforts. It was a major rat hole of unparalleled magnitude.

I wish submitters would start linking to the "printable" versions of the stories: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=189500300&printable=true

This was a real invention, and that's indeed what the patent system is for.

The way it worked in this case was ugly, though. I won't try to describe the patent litigation over the blue LED, but it sure doesn't encourage me to go out and invent things.

nobody has the resources to check such things as recording tv or radio programs on your home pc, tape deck, etc.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Advanced Micro Devices researchers have developed a low aspect ratio Finfet-like transistor the company may begin producing as early as 2007 at the 45-nm node.

Zoran Krivokapic, the lead researcher on the multigate project, based at the company's technology research group in Sunnyvale, Calif., reported that the transistor switching speed -- expressed as CV/I, a measure of capacitance, voltage and current -- was 0.26 picoseconds for the NMOS devices and 0.45 ps for the PMOS transistors. AMD said those are the fastest transistors reported to date for 20-nm gate length structures.

The multigate device was introduced by AMD at the International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials (SSDM) in Tokyo on Thursday (Sept. 18).

The gate surrounds a vertical channel, rather than the planer structure which stacks the channel, gate oxide and electrodes between the source and drain. The AMD structure has a lower aspect ratio than conventional FinFETs, which eases the burden on the lithographic tool and its depth of field.

AMD combined several process technology advances in the multigate structure. It used fully silicided (FUSI) metal gates, instead of electrodes made of polysilicon. Rather than depositing the nickel material, the AMD approach uses a silicidation process to gradually replace polysilicon with nickel silicide to form the metal gate electrodes.

Also, AMD employed fully depleted SOI (silicon on insulator). The fully depleted SOI combined with the metal gate creates a strain on the silicon in the channel, delivering higher-mobility electrons and holes.

Craig Sander, AMD vice president of process technology, said the multigate transistor will allow AMD to maintain roughly 20- percent per annum improvements in performance that has been standard for the semiconductor industry.

The multigate device "demonstrates 50 percent better performance than other multigate devices" discussed in the literature thus far, Sander said.

The stage delay, for example, exceeds the specifications set out by the 2003 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors for devices coming to market in the 2009 timeframe.

Sander said the multigate transistor delivers higher performance while keeping additional process complexity to a minimum. He said the multigate structure "is a prime candidate for the 45-nm node," expected to enter manufacturing as early as 2007.

AMD's multigate transistor is one of several recent announcements indicating that the vertical structures could replace planar CMOS transistors in high-performance devices much earlier than expected a few years ago. Intel Corp. executives, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum this week, indicated they expect some form of a multigate transistor to be introduced at the 45-nm node. Motorola, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and others also are pursuing the technology.

Still no where near NHK's UHD TV... ;P

7680x4320 pixel resolution at 60fps

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/technology/show Article.jhtml?articleID=188500682

EETimes did a fact-rich article in March. The first paragraph of the second page is most illuminating. It seems the "startup" that owns the secret encryption mechanism lacks any visible means of support, and it is a "spinoff" of a government body.

IMHO there is far too much polite gentility and benefit of the doubt shown in the media, and ISO, and WTO and even /. to the thugs who run China. There's no moral or technical equivalency involved here. The Chinese government presented WAPI late accompanied by protectionist threats and has been whining disingenuously about the world mistreating it in the process ever since. WAPI has received over 2 years of special treatment because the rest of the world relies on Chinese de facto slave labor to build its electronic goods. If the ISO process was being run honestly with a legitimate goal of defining a trustworthy secure standard that can be widely implemented in interoperable and competitive ways, WAPI would have been dismissed when first proposed.

In addition to the already cited

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=SG3NCFVRB3QWEQSNDBESKHA?articleID=18 7200783

the EE Times piece (in the printed edition not up on the web) has a sidebar,
with neat background on the inventor:
________

Christmas present leads to ratoary wave epiphany

          The Rotary Traveling Wave technology was the brainchild of MultiGig Inc.
founder and chief technology officer John Wood, a self-taught inventor
and son of an inventor who developed a method for self-aligning installed
underground water pipes. In a company filled with PhDs, Wood is the only
employee without a college degree.

          Wood earned millions from a patent on this technique for flash-welding
plastic materials. His passion for technology drives him to order textbooks
by the dozen when pursuing a new subject, sometimes noting their errors in
scribbled notes in the margins, said MultiGig COO Haris Basit. "I've worked at
research labs including Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs, and John is clearly
a cut above," Basit said.

          In the late 1990s, Wood was researching high-speed serial I/O using
traditional ring and crystal oscillators. "As I started to explore alternatives,
the first thing I looked at was transmission times," he said.

          An intitial prototype, using coaxial cables, was "not very exciting."
Then Christmas 1998 brought an ephiphany. "My son had just gotten a
car racing game with a crossover on a single track. That gave me the idea
for arranging the transmission line that way," said Wood.

          After a few more months of work, Wood decided to use arrays of loops
to create an approach that could work independently of any frequency
or process technology.

          "It took a year or two until we could find direct commercial applications.
Before that, I was just working on it as hobby." said Wood. "But the more we
looked at clock distribution, the more we realized this could be useful."

-- Rick Merritt

Better link here

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=187200783

Looks interesting. I wonder what they mean with 'taps', and if they calculated their power savings right (would each register need its own tap, or if not, is the buffer needed to boost the power from the loop included in the clock system power?)

if you have a few cmos design under your belt maybe this will help make more sense...i'd sooner trust the ee times as a source...

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=187200783

i cant say i have ever seen something like this...but it appears that they it is a very clever microwave structure that uses self inductance to help keep the losses of the energy storage device at a minimum thus requiring far less power than seen in typical designs like LC tank oscillators...it is interesting how most people here are saying bullshit soo quickly.

dude.

It's easy to make stuff cheap when you are stealing IP from the USA. Thanks again China!

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/business/showAr ticle.jhtml?articleID=166402034

.... but maybe the prudent thing to do is wait and see how these new products behave in the real world. Early indications are that there are "issues" as described in the articles below:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0, 39020348,39265307,00.htm
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=186700327
http://wifinetnews.com/archives/006507.html

Taken from http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=186100229 "The graphics processor of Apple Computer Inc.'s MacBook Pro portable has been deliberately slowed down, a Mac user reported recently, probably as part of the overall effort to lower the heat the machine generates. According to a posting on the French language site MacBidouille, a user identified as "SpacetitoX" uncovered the underclocking of the MacBook's ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 graphics chip after adding Windows XP to the computer, then running a beta version of the "ATITools" overclocking utility. By replacing the existing ATI drivers added to the MacBook Pro for dual-booting into Windows XP, SpacetitoX was able to boost one benchmark's result from 61 frames per second to 91."

Ok, now you're simply making things up. From this article regarding Apple's most recent quarterly earnings reports:
"Apple said it shipped 1,112,000 Mac computers and more than 8.5 million iPods music players during the quarter. The iPod shipments represented a 61 percent increase over the same period last year."
Therefore what you have just said is patently incorrect. QED.

..just one slash too much
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/technology/show Article.jhtml?articleID=181503227
better now?

OLED's are nice for displays, but not enough lumen/watt efficiency for general illumination.
LED's are improving much faster - 100Lm/W from Nichia to hit market soon:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/technology/show Article.jhtml?articleID=181503227/

ARM can hardly be considered an "open" architecture. Very old ARM architectures, yes. For some years, ARM (the company) have been aggressively blocking independent implementations of the later ARM architectures, even incomplete subsets, from being distributed.

You're not even allowed to write a software emulator for the application-level instructions!

That makes ARM one of the most closed, encumbered CPU architectures around, of those where you can read the documentation, in my book. At least with x86, MIPS, Power etc. nobody's been stopped from distributing software emulators.

-- Jamie

Hey I got a link Newer by two days than the article posted. Anyway, at least someone isn't repeating a post. There were Amulet cores which were essentially ARM32 clockless cores much before ARM did make a public announcement. I wouldn't be surprised if the 996HS is a rebranded and reworked Amulet. Amulet was quite well known in Academic circles for at least 3 years. That's my $0.02.

Sun exhorts people to make clockless chips

I don't think the Enhanced 911 service you are writing about had much to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks; wasn't the mandate in place before the attacks? For example, there is an article from 1999 speaking of the fact that Enhanced 911 will lead to GPS in mobile phones.

I'd rather spend the extra $750 on flash cache memory for the hard drive. Or, just replace the hard drive altogether. I gurantee either of these would win the average Business Joe's pick in triple blind taste test.

The URL in previous post didn't work because it had a trailing slash. Try this: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=18304314

Similar sentiments were floating around in 2000: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=18304314/

Accoona was also featured on the Drudge Report over the weekend. According to EE Times, Accoona recently held a press conference to announce their enhanced search engine. It looks like they are in the midst of a major marketing campaign.

Accoona was also featured on the Drudge Report over the weekend. According to EE Times, Accoona recently held a press conference to announce their enhanced search engine. It looks like they are in the midst of a major marketing campaign.

That's the National Semiconductor Logo ... national.com

National made most of the electronics for Microsoft's spot watch.

I just read in http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=180204799 that IBM actually used 193nm to make the 30nm lines. An amzing 6.4 times smaller than the wave lenght used! The used a ASML machine for this. Every one (when you have enough money) could by such a machine. So no special advantage for IBM. With a little work Intel, TI, AMD, Freescale, ST or Philips could do this too.

In a nutshell, on a CMOS transistor on an SOI process (such as used by AMD and IBM, but not used by anyone else that I can think of... Intel, TI, TSMC, NEC, Samsung, etc), the delay of the transistor (how fast the transistor is) depends on the history of the signals that were applied previously to the terminals. So the transistor has a memory of previously applied values. Which, now that I write this, seems like it's obvious that this would make a possible memory storage element, but normally this "feature" is a major pain - because it's difficult to track the history of signals on a transistor using current CAD tools for, for example, determining the speed of the final design, you have to assume the worst case (so that your chip works no matter what).

So normally this "feature" is considered a liability, or at least something that designers wish could be an asset but which is too hard to utilize effectively and is thus ignored.

In more gory details, this exerpt from EETimes explains it pretty well:
( http://ww.eetimes.com/issue/bb/showArti...D%3D5730 0076+body+hysteresis+soi&hl=en )
In partially depleted MOS transistors -- the only kind used in production SOI today -- the body of the transistor is a small, electrically isolated piece of silicon trapped between the active portions of the transistor and the insulating layer underneath. If this body is allowed to float, it will take on a voltage determined by the capacitive coupling between it and the other portions of the transistor. But the voltage -- or, more properly, charge -- on this floating body can affect threshold voltage, and hence the drive current, of the transistor.

Ideally, the floating-body effect can deliver a formidable performance gain. Two circumstances arise from that gain, Soisic's Pelloie said. First, the voltage on the body influences the transistor's threshold voltage. "If you switch the gate of the transistor from off to on, then the body potential increases, which yields a decrease of the threshold voltage and then an increase of the drive current," he said. "The switch is then faster than in the bulk CMOS case, where the body is grounded."

The second effect is another mechanism for influencing the threshold voltage. "When you use stacked transistors in a gate, like NAND, NOR and any other combinational gate with multiple inputs, the body-to-source voltage of the transistors corresponds to a forward-bias condition, and the threshold voltage is lowered," Pelloie said. "For bulk CMOS or in a grounded-body situation, if the source has a high voltage value, for instance Vdd [the power supply voltage], the body source voltage then becomes - Vdd and the transistor body source junction is reverse-biased." That increases the threshold voltage and lowers the drive current. Analyzed at the circuit level, he said, these two SOI advantages are combined and globally yield a higher-speed operation.

But there is a catch to these threshold-voltage-lowering mechanisms, as Pelloie explained: "Since the body is floating, it follows the variation of the other terminals of the transistor. The body voltage never keeps the same value, as the transistors are, most of the time, switching in normal operation mode. This results in what we call the history effect: The propagation delay and some other features of the gates depend on the history of the signals applied to their terminals."

-------- end EETimes snippet -----

It will be interesting to see how this particular use of the floating body effect scales as we continue to move to 45nm and beyond. It will also be interesting how it handles low-voltage quantum-induced soft-errors. Also, similar to DRAM, this type of memory will need to be refreshed - if AMD uses it in a design, it will interesting to see how the impact of refreshing, and trying to read a very small effect and amplify it to make a signal will impact the speed of the devices when used in a large cache array.

This is another article covering the licensing which was on digg.com earlier http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ;jsessionid=V2AQAAYC3GVIQQSNDBESKHA?articleID=1771 01749

Micron also makes flash

Not correct - Micron does not manufacture any flash products.

Micron markets flash manufactured and supplied by another (JV manuf.) company...different from 'making' (manufacturing) it themselves (note using $$ from Apple).

Intel, Micron team up for NAND flash push 1. EE Times' top ten stories of 2005 Peter Clarke (12/16/2005 9:55 AM EST) URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID =175004196
LONDON -- This year saw the announcement of the plan to create yet another joint venture manufacturing company -- IM Flash Technologies LLC -- which will supply its parents, Intel and Micron with NAND type flash memory.

can you tell me how you came to the 3x increase conclusion? I believe that Rambus intends to charge a 3.5% royalty per unit from eetimes (which means your price will increase by that much amount). If they did indeed invent the memory, I don't mind paying 3.5% more.. if they didn't I won't. Lets see what the court decides.

dink

There are two issues:
1) vista will not ship with an interface for blueray.
2) vista will come with discounts for computers containing hd-dvds.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=175400242

For example, Intel is designing Xeon2 completely in Bangalore, India! That is an entire product line moved to India. This is very similar to Intel's strategy of moving most mobile chip work to Israel (well, they won the internal product war).

This is a well established phenomenon now. Why hire Indians in the US, when you can hire the same folks in India for 1/4th the price. For Indians, why work in the US, when you can work in your homeland and live a very comfortable life (perhaps more so because money goes a longer way in India in terms of domestic help, etc).

SG

CBS, CNN and ABC News: Big media are lap dogs to the powers that be. To afraid to really speak out for fear of harming revenue, stock value, etc.

IBM's Notes software: If you make software, someone, somewhere will complain.

Kryptonite bike locks: The best bike lock in the world, picked in seconds with a BIC pen.

The most effective defense against being slagged in blogs is to take the charm offensive. Be open and honest. If you've done wrong apologies and move on. Strip their legs out from under them. A harsh retort is more likely to get them a larger audience.

"Ackthpt is t3h rat basturd!1"

Yes, I'm afraid I am. Sorry, I'll try to do better next time. If I had $5, I would most certainly mail it to Happy Guy, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, USA

I wonder if anyone's started a blog critising AMD for eating Intel's lunch.

If you're going to use cash, beware of this

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID =165701001&printable=true

How about 100 GB of storage capacity for the cost of a memory card ? Magnetic microchips used in cell phones could make them fully functional video cameras. In addition, the chips are non-volatile, so startup lag will become a not-so-fond memory. They use much less power than electronic chips. They can be made much smaller, possibly as small as a few atoms. The examples they have already fabricated "use no silicon and require no multilayer processing and so can be manufactured at very low cost on flexible substrates, while offering non-volatility, radiation hardness and several hundreds of MHz of bandwidth" . They're talking about plastic chips. Pretty impressive.

The technology, which is still being developed, can be classified as "nanotech" and is called "magnetic domain-wall logic" and is based on spintronics. Lots of folks are working on this because many believe that spintronics will allow for great advances in areas from quantum computing to DNA based molecular electronic devices. This particular development is important because it represents the first actual construction of logic gates, which are the basis of computing. So far the group has produced a "NOT gate" and a "11-stage serial shift register / digital frequency divider" in a 200nm design rule. They have also demonstrated the transfer of magnetic information without the use of magnetic fields. This paves the way for hybrid chips with both electronic and spintronic components. Such "3D chips" could contain many times the amount of information possible with current electronic chips. They will run cooler, with short "nanowire" pathways, and have the potential to surpass the performance of silicon chips. Moore's Law marches on.

billy - wonder if the "$100 laptop" guys have their phone number?

This is probabaly why the document is called a draft, and Congress is requesting feedback.

Since it is a fair bet that most members of Congress grew up and received their education prior to the PC generation - and wouldn't know Skype from Kazaa from iPod from Linux - now is the time to help educate them before we wind up with yet more misguided laws.

Just as an aside, do you think Judge Roberts is computer and technology literate? - it's his Court that is going to inherit whatever this mess turns into. I tend to think so - he mentioned during the hearings that he was on the legal team that sued Microsoft over the anti-trust issue - surely every slashdotter's hero!

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=166401173

Actually, no.

It is my understanding that Apple has had serious sourcing/price problems with microdrives, who have only ONE vendor (Hitachi), and rather than pay inflated prices for microdrives they redesigned the iPod mini to a flash player so they could use competing vendors, like Samsung. That's what's REALLY behind this great "design" innovation. I'm told theat they were originally going to do a new iPod mini with a larger color screen.

Found an article on this: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=169400638

The nano is nice, but the iPod mini was more durable and had a better price/capacity ratio. But apparently Apple isn't getting good enough margin on them anymore.

(Disclaimer: I have yet to use the nano, but I have seen it in person and I've heard many reports about it's scratch-tastic faceplate.)

The Nikon WiFi support with the D2X does support standards, FTP and PTP/IP, which are both published and supported by Linux.

The ptp/ip protocol:
https://www.fotonation.com/
Linux support for digital cameras and PTP/IP in particular:
http://www.gphoto.org/
Raw image processing, including encrypted Nikon D2X images:
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp? cid=7-6459-7213
http://www.photoreview.com.au/Articlexasp/90c83053 -0a7f-45cc-ba68-9560e9f3c061/Default.htm
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C3218/
http://dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=3061
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=E0TTJLUSVT5NSQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?art icleID=47204433&_requestid=171509

Here's another reference to the capacity of a DVD-ROM.. Older, I know.

Roughly 15 gigs per layer my friend.

This is known as immersion lithography. Intel has kept it off its official roadmap because they're able to push their current technology to 45nm and possibly beyond. AMD on the other hand has started purchasing immersion steppers and it looks like they're trying to get them operational in production by 2006.

A few small corrections to your comment: it's not water, and there's no "flow". The fluid used is engineered to increase something called the "numerical aperture" of the lens (or, the NA). Typical fluids include ethylene glycol and certain other alcohols diluted with deionized water. In reference to the "flowing," the steppers simply pick up a bead of water and use it. When the wafer comes out of the stepper it's essentially dry.

One potential downside to this process is the sensitivity of the resist reaction to water. Unfortunately in order to work at the low end the wafers must be post-exposure baked immediately coming out of the stepper. This reduced throughput time since you can't do an entire lot of wafers at once unless you set up 25 hot plates.

Rochester Institute of Technology recently revealed that they have been able to push immersion lithography with high NA fluids to 31nm lines and spaces, which is only 2 generations from the proposed physical limit of silicon gate transistors (11 nm).

Yes, it's the The brains behind Apple's Rosetta.

There are some other links on the Transitive Home Page about Apple using it for Rosetta.

Why do you ascribe this write-once, run anywhere stuff to Java? Look up the UCSD P-System. It used p-code (pseudo code) that was interpreted on multiple platforms. There was a UCSD Pascal released for the Apple in 1979 or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_P-system

So I think you are off-based on the idea that the US had to match the Japanese on this front and that the Japanese and iTron created it.

I know several Taiwanese who would take umbrage and your insinuation that the Japanese created their foundries. It's as if you think all other countries in the Orient are subservient to Japan...

ARM isn't an open core. ARM has been known to sue companies that implement their instruction set.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000228S0007

IBM will also produce a special northbridge chip, which was designed by Apple, that links the processor to the memory subsystem and I/O. The processor will be able to send and receive data to this chip through its front-side bus interface at 1-GHz, six times faster than the front-side bus for the previous G4 processor. (Source: EE Times)

I hope you know what a 'northbridge' is, and why it's called a 'chipset'.

Somebody please mod grandparent up, instead of the parent.

They're still working on putting out a chip based on LongRun2, which reduces transistor leakage. This is very important for cutting power consumption and increasing CPU speed. They've also licensed the technology to Fujitsu, NEC and Sony, none of which have released a product based on it yet.

It's quite possible, though apparently unlikely, that Transmeta will turn things around and manage to survive. However, Intel is already all over the leakage problem, so this may well be the end of Transmeta.

MYTH #2: "New, innovative companies won't start up overseas."

Really? What do you think these laid-off chip designers are gonna do when they get back to Chennai? Sell trinkets to tourists?

MYTH #3: "R&D jobs don't go overseas. Hell, they don't even leave the US east and west coast, for the most part."

REALITY:

• GE Corporate Research in Bangalore and Shanghai
• HP Opens New Research Center in Singapore
• HP Bangalore Research
• IBM India Research Center
• IBM China Research Center
• Microsoft Research Beijing

Per nasscom.org, "A recent study on the biotech market by business intelligence firm, Ernst & Young, has shown that India has the potential to become a leading hub of biotech projects. Indian companies have the capability to enter segments such as manufacturing biogenerics, contract research services, clinical trials and even areas such as bio-informatics."

MYTH #5: "Ultimately, what xenophobes need to realize is that writing shitty code doesn't make anyone "high-tech." You're no more entitled to an inflated salary than the auto workers who saw their work moved overseas - if someone with no education can do your job cheaper, you don't deserve your job."

"Accenture in India has also been moving into front office work such as doing clinical data management for its pharma clients. Accenture's pharma team here, which consists of doctors, dentists and biologists, analyses data from tests and helps its pharma client to gain `time-to-market' advantage. "Normally, for a BPO, back office activities are the target, but we are beginning to spot opportunities in front office activities as well," Cole said."