Now Hear This!

Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN's short review of the week's happenings.

As the Dow played limbo this week, dipping below 8000 and offering analysts the question, "how low can it go?" more cuts were made to semiconductor industry growth estimates as well as staffs.

On the same day, Micron announced it would slash 15% of its staff and iSuppli revised its 2008 industry revenue forecast to just 3.5% growth, down from the market researcher's original 9.6% estimate. Both Micron and iSuppli cited the harsh economy and harsher memory market in doing so Thursday.

If that's not enough to make you shudder, Gartner reported this week that semiconductor equipment demand is not expected to recover until 2010 and advised the industry to prepare for a prolonged downturn while device manufacturers adjust supply to meet slowing demand. 

Even so, it was an overall active week for manufacturing. Cadence and Tessera announced an approach to 22-nm litho that abandons hope for extreme UV lithography and instead substitutes more comprehensive optical and process proximity correction and optimization of the illumination pattern in the stepper. 

Elpida shrunk its 1-Gbit DDR2 SDRAM size by leveraging a new architecture on first-generation 65-nm process products, and estimated that costs for the shrunken version of will be approximately 20% less compared to first-generation products.

Ultratech acquired patent rights to IBM's wafer annealing portfolio, including hardware for thermal processing of semiconductor wafers, as well as patents for temperature control and metrology.

And while NXP was busy putting its 200-mm fab up for sale, AMD was shaking hands with Advanced Technology Investment Co of Abu Dhabi, spinning out its manufacturing work into a new entity named "The Foundry Company." Yeah, the name isn't exactly creative, but the AMD split is being received favorably, although questions still persist as to how the Intel rival will gain MPU market share and as to how the newbie entity will challenge foundry giants like TSMC.

Speaking of challenges, we're now less than four weeks away from the 2008 US elections and EDN readers are chiming in on who the better presidential candidate is, McCain or Obama, when it comes to tech.

George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a bipartisan trade organization, and member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also took a moment to chime in about the upcoming elections and thepolicy issues affecting technology innovation and future leadership, including R&D funding, and H-1B visas.

By the way, the H-1B process has been discovered to be riddled with fraud. According to investigations done by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services there's a 20% violation rate of the H-1B visa program and the situation is one of "significant vulnerability."

Have something to say on the above noted happenings? Share your comments on this week's news and analysis below.