by Robert S. Grimes
Modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are great for a wide range of high-speed, complex signal processing but can be difficult to interface to external systems. Microprocessors are great for interfacing to other systems, especially when equipped with Ethernet for communications, but don’t offer the same levels of performance.
Until recently, [...]

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By Liz Tay
US researchers have successfully assembled a tiny processor from nanometre-scale components to perform basic arithmetic and logical functions. Harvard University’s Charles M. Lieber and his team built 960μm2 (square micrometre) ‘logic tiles’ that could perform adder, subtractor, multiplexer, demultiplexer and clocked D-latch functions.

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by Ben Hardwidge
IBM has revealed that graphene can’t yet fully replace silicon inside CPUs, as a graphene transistor can’t actually be completely switched off.
In an interview for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about chip-building materials, Yu-Ming Lin from IBM Research - Nanometer Scale Science and Technology told us that ‘graphene as it is will not [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Boffins at IBM have come up with a better way to embed laser communications onto processor and memory chips using plain vanilla CMOS manufacturing processes, paving the way for three-dimensional chips integrating hundreds of processors, their main memory, and on-chip optical networks that will, it is hoped, allow for the creation [...]

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One perspective for thinking of the embedded world is as a spectrum of complexity ranging from ASIC to MCU. ASIC designs are enormously expensive and take years to complete but the potential for innovation is almost unbounded. MCU projects are almost free in comparison and take months or even just weeks to finish, but they [...]

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An international research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University have demonstrated a molecular circuit that can evolve continuously to solve complex problems that challenge today’s supercomputers.
The massively parallel circuit contains a layer of molecular switches (monolayer) that simultaneously interact in a manner similar to the information processing performed by the neurons in the human [...]

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Some laws are made to be broken, and others are made to be followed. A team of IBM Researchers in collaboration with two Swiss partners are looking to keep one law in particular alive and well for another 15 years: Moore’s Law. The law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively [...]

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By Stacey Higginbotham
Tilera, a startup building chips that contain anywhere from 16 to 100 cores, said today it’s raised $25 million in a third round of funding from investors including Broadcom (BRCM). Chips made by Tilera, which we named as one of five multicore statups to watch two years ago, are aimed at boosting performance [...]

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has awarded Columbia University $2.8 million in Recovery Act economic stimulus funding to design power converters that efficiently regulate voltage for multi-core processors right on the chip, which could save U.S. data centers billions of kilowatts of energy yearly.
IBM Research and Cornell University will also participate in the program [...]

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The semiconductor market in the last decade has experienced two “once-in-a-lifetime” events: the dot-com bust and the global economic crisis. The coming year will bring a return to reality for the global semiconductor market, no longer driven by bubble economics that fostered the illusion of wealth.
The real driver of global economic growth will no [...]

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by Mark LaPedus
The latest craze in next-generation chip design is 3-D. IC makers are exploring the possibly of stacking current devices in a 3-D configuration. Experts define a true 3-D package as one that stacks various chips vertically and then connects them by deploying through-silicon vias (TSVs). The aim is to shorten the interconnections between [...]

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Eco-friendly 3D microchips, being developed by a clutch of cutting-edge research labs, are likely to boost computing power 10-fold, consuming negligible energy. They are being developed jointly by IBM Research Lab, EPFL and ETH Zurich, the twin Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology.
The project, under the leadership of EPFL’s John R. Thome’s (Lausanne), aims to develop [...]

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Scientists are developing 3D microprocessors cooled from the inside through channels as thin as a human hair filled with a liquid coolant. This method is currently being developed by researchers from the EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and its sister organisation ETH Zurich to boost the performance of future computers. The CMOSAIC project, [...]

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Intel Corp. is still exploring the future use of 3-D devices based on through-silicon vias (TSVs), but the company said that it has still not found the right application or “product intercept” for the technology.
Right now, chip makers are shipping limited 3-D devices based on TSVs, mainly CMOS image sensors, MEMS, and, to some degree, [...]

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By Nicolas Mokhoff
“Semiconductor research is coming up short on new ideas to extend Moore’s Law of consistently packing more transistors on a chip. Innovations in emerging technologies need to be accelerated.
That was Pushkar Apte’s claim at the International Electron Devices Meeting here as some 1200 researchers gathered to present and take in the latest technology [...]

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By Peter Clarke
“Lime Microsystems Ltd. (Guildford, England) and PicoChip Designs Ltd. (Bath, England) have announced they are collaborating to develop a reference design for femtocells for third- and fourth-generation communications.
The platform will operate in all frequency bands of interest, including existing and emerging bands. It will be based on Lime’s multi-band multi-standard RF transceiver IC, [...]

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IBM officials are saying that they plan to continue manufacturing and selling its Cell processor, refuting rumors circulating on the Internet that the technology was being killed.
The future of the Cell processor been the topic of speculation on the Web since a Nov. 19 report from the online German Web site Heise Online quoted an [...]

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Intel’s six-core Gulftown processors got delayed to second quarter of 2010 and was tested by Polish site PC Lab. This six-core Intel Gulftown processor is from the 32nm Westmere family flagship with 12MB shared L3 cache and compatible with Intel Socket LGA1366 based motherboards. As per the tests, this multi-core Gulftown chip showed 50 percent [...]

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Despite all the all the recent hoopla about GPGPUs and eight-core CPUs, proponents of reconfigurable computing continue to sing the praises of FPGA-based HPC. The main advantage of reconfigurable computing, or RC for short, is that programmers are able to change the circuitry of the chip on the fly. Thus, in theory, the hardware can [...]

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Femtocell baseband chip vendor Percello Ltd. (Ra’anana, Israel) is planning to demonstrate 16 simultaneous calls over its PRC6500 chipset at the Femtocells America conference, November 16 to 17, 2009, in San Diego.
The PRC6500 is, which offers the capacity and speed required for enterprise-grade applications. PRC6500, the second product in Percello’s Aquilo chip family, supports 16 [...]

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