To the outside observer, improvements in PC architecture are evolutionary but logical. Processors advance inevitably in speed and performance, in happy accordance with Moore's Law. For Nebojsa Novakovic, a consultant in...

Embedded processors are now central to the converged environment that many in the IT and electronics industries are calling the digital home. Noam Shendar, director of Strategic Marketing for MIPS Technologies, argues that...

The decision as to whether to go with a custom-ASIC solution or whether to take the programmable-logic route is one that increasingly confronts the chip-design and electronics industries. Historically, there has been a...

Despite the attractions of the fabless-plus-foundry model, any foundry hoping to compete in an industry dominated by the likes of UMC and TSMC will need to think carefully about its strategy. In the case of Silterra, whose...

Several years ago, US-headquartered Fortemedia was known as an IC supplier providing audio controllers for sound card vendors, including several Taiwan companies. While the company has more recently jumped into a new market...

Today, your digital camera and your mobile phone are probably operated and controlled with the help of a real-time operating system or RTOS. The chances are the RTOS could be from Wind River. As device software systems...

AMD’s drive to 64-bit processors surprised everyone with its speed, even as detractors commented that there would be little or no performance gain on the desktop without a 64-bit OS and 64-bit applications. Whatever...

Aixtron, headquartered in Aachen, Germany, is a supplier of deposition equipment for the semiconductor industry, traditionally specializing in gas-phase deposition. VLSI Research estimates that Aixtron was the world's largest...

It’s normal in the EDA industry, these days, to say that growth is flat. That doesn’t apply to Magma Design Automation, which started out in the late 1990s, under the leadership of Rajeev Madhavan, with the...

While industry experts have always pointed out that the Intel-backed universal serial bus (USB) is less versatile than its I/O rival, IEEE1394, USB 2.0 is now delivering up to 480Mbps, and clearly it’s with us to...

Tower Semiconductor may be one of the smaller foundries, but it is now placing a fresh emphasis on flexibility in meeting the specialized needs of its customers. Over the past year, the company has re-organized to emphasize...

The downturn of late 2000 to 2002, coupled with high levels of capital investment, placed many PCB companies in a bind. Those that have survived have been the companies best able to move with the times and adopt a slew...

A recurring question in semiconductor company boardrooms is, “Are we keeping up with Moore’s Law?” At technical seminars, the question becomes, “Can Moore’s Law continue?” Whichever of...

Despite initial skepticism from some quarters, Bluetooth has established a growing market presence and continues to assert its viability. One interesting development is the proposed adoption, by the Bluetooth SIG, of Ultra...

The configurable IP core is a relatively new phenomenon, but ARC International has been in the business for some seven years now. ARC’s customer base is now at over 100 companies, and for Derek Meyer, SVP of Sales...

Lattice Semiconductor International is up against such well known names in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as Xilinx, Altera and Actel, but the company launched several new products in 2004 that define it as not...

As a “classical” IDM, with some 50,000 employees, STMicroelectronics is strongly positioned to be a major supplier of electronics for consumer multimedia and the digital home. That’s not to say that “ST”...

While market research indicates that rear-projection TVs are currently seeing a wave of renewed market enthusiasm, particularly in North America, models were not noticeably in evidence at Computex Taipei, in June. One interesting...

The world of embedded computing now sees a myriad devices coming into the market, often complex in their "converged" electronic design. Among the responses from the chip design industry has been the configurable...

Last month, Vitesse Semiconductor opened a Customer Technology Center in Taipei. Equipped with a lab, the new center gives customers access to Vitesse's team of application engineers, for assistance with complex communications...

During his recent visit to Taiwan, Philips Semiconductors CEO Frans van Houten stated that Philips’ foundry production is currently running at full capacity and the company will increase its outsourcing to fabs in...

Wireless-mesh networking is like a rare species – often talked about but seldom seen in the wild. One Taiwan company busy turning mesh networking into reality is Accton Technology, which showed its WA6102-WM wireless-mesh...

The keenest competition in the global television market is the race for the next generation of flat-panel technology, and leading the charge is the UK-based Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), a pioneer of polymer-OLED...

ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) continues to turn the soft-IP business model into a success story. Last year saw the company undertake major acquisitions, and this year will see the arrival of a new Cortex applications processor...

Acard Technology is best known for its SCSIDE bridge solution, which allows IDE, and now SATA, drives to be aggregated on a SCSI interface. This allows mass data storage solutions that have all the virtues of SCSI without...