Now Hear This!

Here's one that should be taught in law schools as more and more cases come to courts based on IP, technologies, and new legal provisions that most juries made up of so-called peers would not fully understand.

A trial began this week involving two engineers that have been accused of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and to steal trade secrets. Indicted by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in September 2007 after being arrested in June 2006, US citizen Lan Lee, aka Lan Li, of Palo Alto, and Chinese national Yuefei Ge of San Jose, allegedly conspired to steal trade secrets from their former employer, NetLogic Microsystems, and from TSMC, at which they were not employed.

According to the indictment, the defendants allegedly created a company, SICO Microsystems, "for the pu...Read More

Election Day is still a month away, but there's another vote you should be aware of.  It's called Project 10¹⁰⁰.  Sponsored by Google, Project is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible, that launched last October.

Project's voting has been delayed more than once, which encouraged some naysayers across the Web to call the effort a scam. Google insists that it was simply overwhelmed by the flood of ideas that came in (more than 154,000) and that the organization process took more time that it originally thought. Whatever the reason, the delay caused Project and its vote to slip my mind. Luckily, I was reminded of it and the vote this afternoon by Deirdre Walsh, a member of the NI team who I follow through my personal Twitter account (@deffree). (Thanks, Deir...Read More

IBM is claiming images of the chemical structure inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution. Read our news story for the details on how IBM scientists achieved this (IBM claims chemical structure images of a molecule), but also take five minutes and view the below IBM-produced video on the research. The video also discusses a previous experiment by IBM where scientists measured the charge states of atoms and briefly touches on how the two experiments tie into atomic scale.

It goes without saying to EDN's engineering audience, but such advances could one day bring processors and memory that are faster, smarter, and much smaller in size than anything possible (perhaps even anything plausible) today.

What do you think? Has IBM reached a milestone? Share your comments on the news or video below.

In this world, one either stays up to the minute or falls behind. That's what we heard from our readers when EDN's Twitter efforts were so well accepted at its spring launch. Now @EDNmagazine on Twitter is approaching 1,000 followers. From what can be told from their listed bios, they are a mix of design engineers, execs, sales folk, at-home tech hobbyists, professors, and students -- a rich and vibrant community of innovators from around the globe.

So far, there has been little complaint from @EDNmagazine's Twitter following. Rather, after a warm welcome by our audience at launch, many of our tweets have since been "retweeted" or shared by our followers and @EDNmagazine is often noted in "Follow Friday" posts.

But despite that, and despite the fact that the ...Read More

Global Foundries had two milestone events in the last week, ones that perked up another rainy workweek for this New Yorker. This morning the company announced its first customer as aspun out company from AMD,  landing low-power manufacturing work for bigwig STMicroelectronics. And prior to that, the company announced Friday it had broken ground on its upstate New York 300-mm fab.

Admittedly, I've had little confidence that shovel would meet dirt on this ground breaking. Covering the fab since rumblings of AMD plans began in 2006 and for years attending AMD events where execs danced around questions on the plans for the fab build -- a ...Read More

There has been much uproar about the Wall Street Journal report released over the weekend claiming that 54-year-old Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago in Tennessee. Apple has not issued an official statement, nor is it expected to do so immediately as Jobs was out on medical leave at the time and the company has covered its legal bases by publicly stated that back in January when it vaguely announced its leader was suffering from a "hormone imbalance." Perhaps a statement will come when Jobs returns to his desk; he is slated to do so at the end of the month.

Holders of Apple stock, AAPL, have long criti...Read More

Will Moore's Law soon become no more? A new report from iSuppli Corp suggests that the law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and making up much of the foundation of the semiconductor industry, could be academic by 2014.

ISuppli argues that the high cost of semiconductor manufacturing equipment is making continued chip-making advancements too expensive for volume production. That, in turn, relegates Moore’s Law to the laboratory and "alters the fundamental economics of the industry," according to the market research company.

“The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nm, to 18-nm nodes,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for...Read More

For all the EDN readers who clicked on our story last week "Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, other engineers honored by National Inventors Hall of Fame" and wanted to know more about what Grove said when he accepted his lifetime achievement award on Saturday, May 2, check out the below YouTube video.

He is introduced by Ted Hoff, co-inventor of the microprocessor, who said of Grove, "Inventors tend to be dreamers, and Andy taught us how to turn dreams into reality."

Grove, himself, spent his short three-minute speech discussing the patent system and its issues. He received his award as the National Inventors Hall of Fame celebrated 50 years of the IC and honored 15 other engineers who have made significant contributions related to or enabled by semiconductors.

"As we ce...Read More

What's more contagious: H1N1 Flu, more commonly known as Swine Flu, or fear of H1N1 Flu? I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to guess it's the fear.

Swine Flu is a serious issue, one that demands precaution be taken to minimize further spread. But before more quarantines go into effect and before it gets to the level of panic that was seen with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) six years back, give yourself a little perspective. 

According to data updated today at 11am eastern by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 279 officially reported human cases of Swine Flu in the United States and a lone one death across 36 states. This editor's home state of New York has recorded about a quarter of the US cases, 73. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have bee...Read More

Apple is hiring chip gurus and the big question industry watchers are asking is why. I, as many others do, suspect the company is readying a chip design group and is rightfully doing so by recruiting some of the semiconductor industry's best and brightest for its team.

Let's review: According to reports, Apple recently hired Raja Koduri, a former CTO of AMD's graphics products group. Koduri follows Apple's hire of Bob Drebin, who had held the same position at AMD. The two engineers also both came from ATI's former Imageon handheld graphics division, which AMD sold off to Qualcomm at the beginning of the year.

And in January, Mark Papermaster was clear to work at Apple after the ex-IBM engineer fought a non-compete agreement. Papermaster has extensive experience in PowerPC architecture and just be...Read More

President Obama has named the United States' first national CTO and who it is came as somewhat of a surprise.

Aneesh Chopra wasn't even on the radar screen. Bets had been placed on big names including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bezos. Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the designers behind the TCP/IP architecture that made the Internet possible; Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University; and Larry Lessig, a public-minded scholar on law in the digital age and the founder of Stanford University's Center for the Internet and Society, has been among the lesser-known ...Read More

ADI is on it. Digi-Key is on it. ISuppli is on it. And now EDN is on it.

As part of our ever-striving effort to keep the electronics industry informed, we’ve joined Twitter, www.twitter.com/EDNmagazine, the now famed social media tool that allows short "tweets" to be sent directly to associates, called followers.

I first checked out Twitter for EDN more than a year ago, and in early 2008 shrugged it off as a fly-by-night waste of time that did little more than share the mundane blips of life. For the record, I also wrote off e-mail as a means of communication in the early 1990s, online reporting in the late 1990s, and blogging in the early millennium, considering all of them hollow and insignificant at their respective popular birth times. As I've since built a career in onl...Read More

Based on recent data from various sources, it appears the tech industry has a rosier employment picture than many other sectors.

According to a report out this week from TechAmerica, formed in December by the merger of AeA and the Information Technology Association of America, tech sustained only a 0.6% drop in employment, or 38,000 jobs, in Q4 2008 when total private-sector employment declined by 1.3%.

And the 0.6% drop didn't stop the sector from adding jobs in 2008 overall. TechAmerica reported that the high-tech industry added 77,000 net jobs last year, for a total of 5.9 million workers. 

To be true, TechAmerica also reported that while the 2008 tech job growth dipped compared to the 79,600 jobs added in 2007, it was notably down from the ...Read More

Here in NY, I have a small lemon tree tossed in-pot into my backyard. It's a house plant that's been bred to only grow to 5 feet in height maximum and that, due to my lack of a green thumb and any basic gardening skills, was left outside all year, un-watered for several months. Forced to suffer a long harsh east coast winter, it has lost all but a few leaves that are now brown, wind torn, and that crumble when touched.

Yet somehow -- perhaps insulated from the cold by the leaves and mud collected on its base, perhaps nourished serendipitously with snow and rain, and natural helpers like earthworms and rich soil -- this lemon tree is now once again showing buds. 

Were this a plant native to a NY-like climate I would not find this surprising. Evergreens, for example, thrive unattended in the cold. Lemon trees, however, are west coast, sun-loving, warmth-needing...Read More

With the April 1, 2009 H-1B visa application process start date just weeks away, reports from the Valley suggest that even though the number of US citizens on unemployment benefits recently hit a new high, high-tech employers will still lineup for H-1B applications seeking to claim an H-1B worker in the upcoming fiscal year.

As has been done in recent years, H-1Bs will be provided to 65,000 people chosen at random from a pool of petitions filed in the first five business days in April, allowing the selected foreigners to begin work at a the US company that filed for them in the fiscal year starting October 1. An additional 20,000 H-1Bs will be provided on behalf of persons excused from the cap under the “advanced degree” (...Read More