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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Today AMD shared more details of its upcoming Fusion processors for the first time. Chekib Akrout, general manager of AMD’s Technology group, said the company is creating two very different new x86 cores: Bulldozer, designed for servers and mainstream desktop and notebook clients, and Bobcat, a very small design for low-power applications
Akrout said Bobcat has [...]

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Silicon foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) is still having yield issues with its 40-nm process, according to analysts.
TSMC’s 40-nm yield problems surfaced earlier this year, but the company claimed it largely resolved the problem. However, during a conference call on Thursday, graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. discussed 40-nm capacity and yield constraints [...]

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by Brooke Crothers
Despite persistent rumors, Nvidia’s chief executive says the graphics chip supplier is not working on an Intel-compatible chip.
In an exclusive interview with CNET Thursday, Brook Crothers asked CEO Jen-Hsun Huang about the possibility of Nvidia coming up with its own x86 (Intel-compatible) chip technology, after the company reported strong third-quarter earnings. A [...]

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Micron Technologies Inc. has introduced a multi-chip package (MCP) memory for smart phones, personal media players, and mobile Internet devices (MIDs) that includes a 4-Gbit NAND flash memory die and a 2-Gbit low-power DDR die.
The 4-Gbit NAND flash memory is implemented in 34-nm process technology while the DRAM is implemented in a 50-nm process. The [...]

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In a splashy New York City event, Juniper Networks announced its next generation of silicon, systems, software and partnerships around a family of networking products geared to serve businesses and service providers. Details are still scarce on the products that the company will use to attack archrival Cisco Systems.
The products are based on Junos Trio, [...]

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The information provided to me so far about the ARM-Xilinx programmable systems collaboration was long on canned quotes and short on detail which of course leads to all sorts of questions and speculations.
ARM has worked with programmable logic vendors in the past, such as Atmel and Actel, but in heavily prescriptive ways. There have even [...]

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A $5.5 million contract has been awarded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to Raytheon to design, fabricate and test self-healing mixed-signal ics.
The HEALICS contract, as it is known, could be worth $11million for Raytheon if both project phases are completed. Phase one involves the demonstration of a self-healing mixed-signal core; and [...]

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