The Week In Review: Manufacturing

By Mark LaPedus - 23 May, 2014 - Comments: 1

About 150 to 200 employees from IBM’s chip unit will be dispatched to work at GlobalFoundries, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. GlobalFoundries said the arrangement is temporary, according to the report. GlobalFoundries is the leading candidate to buy IBM’s chip unit, which is apparently on the block. To date, however, GlobalFoundries and IBM have yet to make any announcements on the... » read more

Memory Matters For Mid-Range Mobile Devices

By Ajay Jain - 09 May, 2014 - Comments: 2

In recent months, we’ve seen signs of saturation in the high-end mobile device market where smartphones and tablets retail for more than $300. The largest growth in the mobile device markets are in Asia, with China in particular showing an annual growth rate of more than 50% in the mid-range ($100-$299) market while low-end products retail for less than $50! Features like storage capacity,... » read more

Powerful Memories

By Brian Bailey - 07 May, 2014 - Comments: 1

Memory consumes more of the surface area of a die than any other component. So what changes have happened over the past few years to reduce the power consumption of memories, and where are the big opportunities for saving power? Let's take a closer look. A Growing Concern One of the key drivers for SoCs is the desire to reduce product costs, reduce form factors, reduce power, increase perfo... » read more

New Rules For DRAM

By Jim Feldhan - 20 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 0

By Jim Feldhan DRAM revenues grew by more than 30% in 2013. Average selling prices increased more than 45% as capacity constraints especially for LPDRAM, motivated the transition from 2GB density parts up to 4GB DRAM units declined by almost 10%. Revenue growth rates of more than 30% combined with a declining unit base are not new to the memory market. But 2013 was a pivotal year for DRAM. ... » read more

The Road Ahead for 2014: Semiconductors

By Brian Bailey - 23 Jan, 2014 - Comments: 1

Last week, Semiconductor Engineering examined the 2014 predictions from several thought leaders in the industry and published those predictions that related to general market trends. Many of those predictions require some advances in semiconductor technologies and fabrications capabilities. It is those predictions that will be examined in this part, followed next week by the predictions related... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing And Design

By Mark LaPedus - 10 Jan, 2014 - Comments: 1

Crucial.com reveals a surprising way to gain more time for improving one's personal health: fix a slow computer. A nationwide survey revealed that U.S. adults think they waste an average of 16 minutes per day waiting for their computer to load or boot up. Equating to two hours each week and four days per year lost to the wiles of a slow computer, it's no surprise that 66% of Americans say that ... » read more

The Week In Review: Oct. 11

By Mark LaPedus - 11 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Demand is running high for DRAMs, thanks to last month’s fab fire at Hynix’ China plant. “The impact from Hynix' fab fire seems to be far more extensive than we had originally thought. We now think the factory is most likely up at the earliest by May/June 2014, which certainly provides robust pricing support for DRAM. Hynix is in the process of convertin... » read more

Flexibility Improves Memory Interface Bandwidth

By Ann Mutschler - 10 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

In today’s SoCs, memory is the heart or at least one of the main elements of the design. As such, designing them carefully is paramount to achieving the best bandwidth, performance and power. Performance is very important to be able to access the memory and to trade and store information from different IPs with shared memories or local memories. From the power perspective, every access to... » read more

MRAM Begins To Attract Attention

By Mark LaPedus - 19 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus In the 1980s, there were two separate innovations that changed the landscape in a pair of related fields—nonvolatile memory and storage. In one effort, Toshiba invented the flash memory, thereby leading to NAND and NOR devices. On another front, physicists discovered the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect, a technology that forms the basis of hard disk drives, magnetores... » read more

Five Emerging DRAM Interfaces You Should Know For Your Next Design

By Various Writers - 12 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 0

Producing DRAM chips in commodity volumes and prices to meet the demands of the mobile market is no easy feat, and demands for increased bandwidth, low power consumption, and small footprint don’t help. This paper reviews and compares five next-generation DRAM technologies— LPDDR3, LPDDR4, Wide I/O 2, HBM, and HMC—that address these challenges. To view this white paper, click here. » read more

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