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01 September 2008
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News & Analysis
What is the next trend that design engineers in Taiwan must grasp? Despite the impact of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and soaring oil prices on the global economy, there is still good news. According to a report from World Semiconductor Trade Statistics, the global semiconductor market will achieve considerable growth in 2008.
Amid continued debate on whether semiconductor R&D is an endangered species or is successfully evolving to adapt to changing realities, Intermolecular Inc. and Semiconductor Research Corp. braved the debacle, with each announcing their own R&D initiatives. Intermolecular reported on a memory R&D pilot line, while SRC described emerging programs in analog, energy, medical and multicore.
Forget Atom. Forget Android. To see the future of computing, look to the Adobe Open Screen Project, an ambitious effort to bring full-featured Internet experience to devices ranging from TVs to mobile handsets. Should the project achieve its aims, it will radically alter CE devices and our relationships with them.
Taiwan's share of the growing notebook market is expected to continue to increase slowly, according to a report from DisplaySearch. But systems makers must confront such challenges as the transition to LED backlights and the need to expand overseas markets.
Shifting its focus from manufacturing to design, Taiwan's electronic industry is getting a shot in the arm with a bigger, modified show, as the International IC-Taiwan Conference and Exhibition (IIC-Taiwan) features the Components Zone.
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Passive component miniaturization prevails for a growing number of portable electronics designs. If you can squeeze a higher capacitance or voltage in a smaller case size, that's even better. With resistors, there is a push for the same or better performance in smaller packages, particularly for consumer devices such as multimedia phones.
With the entire semiconductor industry in a state of flux and established markets offering little growth, programmable logic (PL) suppliers are exploring new opportunities. One of the promising markets that FPGA and CPLD vendors have been looking into is the automotive sector.
Seeking to solve a major power problem in computing, NOR flash vendor Spansion Inc. has rolled out a new class of memory that is said to have the potential to replace DRAM in the data center.
UWB technology uniquely offers a handset the potential to wirelessly connect peripheral devices previously reserved for wired connections. In particular, high-bandwidth connections to peripherals such as external HDD and displays require UWB's high performance level to function effectively.
For the mobile video market to move beyond the early adopter phase, device manufacturers must push the limits of today's technology and embrace the future of high-definition (HD) mobile multimedia. This vision includes cellphones that can record and playback HD videos.
Today's multimedia phones require the density, cost and write performance advantages that NAND flash offers. Because of these, NAND flash has become mainstream within mobile phones through the growing use of additional high-density embedded storage chips card slots.
With a few exceptions, the video IP market is characterized by a large number of small players. This market fragmentation is problematic for both IP vendors and their customers. If you're designing a video-oriented SoC, how do you go about choosing components that will work together? It's difficult to evaluate the video performance of a single IP block or chip.
Technical Features
The viability of Ethernet-over-powerline technology is proven. Powerline is by far the most convenient and cost effective medium in home networking for providing high bandwidth to any device in any room. All that remains to be seen then is which competing technology that offers at least 150Mbit/s bandwidth will win the race to market dominance. (PDF file)
Delivering uncompressed HDTV content wirelessly has become the holy grail of wireless video connectivity. However, existing and emerging wireless standards such as 802.11n and UWB are not capable of delivering such high video rates. This article introduces the joint source channel coding video-modem approach for wireless video transfer. (PDF file)
Cramming high-quality audio components into the confines of a flat-panel TV simply isn't a feasible solution. The answer is the soundbar—a modern-styled speaker located directly below a flat-panel TV. The soundbar significantly improves audio experience without the complexity of an entire home theater setup. (PDF file)
The ultralow-cost (ULC) handset market currently sees high levels of interest from all industry players. This interest driving the market is justified for a number of key reasons. Here's how mobile Internet is entering the ULC market. (PDF file)
High-definition (HD) creates a new quality-of-experience. This is determined by a number of factors, most importantly picture and sound quality. Test and measurement is all about producing and managing quality. And quality is not a process of fixing something at the end of production, but has to be worked on right from start and at every step in the chain. (PDF file)
DisplayPort-based systems must protect all potentially exposed interface signals and power pins to meet or exceed the EOS specification of IEC 61000-42,Level 4 (±15kV Air, ±8kV Contact) without damage, while maintaining eye pattern specs for signal integrity. (PDF file)
This article provides an example for implementing OFDM modulation and demodulation in reconfigurable wireless systems. FFT module reuse is the core of the architectures considered. The design example implements OFDM modulation and demodulation for 3GPP LTE that supports reconfigurable FFT size and CP size. (PDF file)
The automation of formal protocol verification using VIPs enables a rapid and exhaustive verification of critical IP interfaces. Once a VIP library is written and tested, it can be re-used to improve the verification quality and shorten the verification schedule. VIPs can also be used to ease the verification of high-level system properties since they provide a "free" environment. (PDF file)
Opinion
The show began 15 years ago and it was called the EDA & Test-Taiwan or EDA&T-Taiwan for short. Eyeing Taiwan's young but exhilarating chip industry, the new show was striving to capture the soul of up-and-coming EDA business in Asia.
People may say that multicore software programming with today's languages is just a temporary issue until the real parallel programming solution comes along. But let's not forget that the "gap" in stopgap is often a lot wider than anyone ever thought it would be.
Interview
Buoyed by the strong performance of its MCU portfolio, it is no surprise that Atmel's strategy centers on this product. MCU is Atmel's fastest growing product, and the company anticipates double-digit growth for the line, growing 20 percent year-on-year, noted Yang Chiah Yee, VP of Asia sales.
Vital Signs
Chips face the so-called "More-than-Moore" 3D integration route in order to pursue the continued aggressive scaling demanded by the historical law. 3D integration with through-silicon vias (3D-TSV) will accelerate the consolidation happening in CMOS wafer fabs and the shift toward the fabless foundry model.
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