Now Hear This!

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

Unemployment lines got a little longer this week when both MIPS and Rambus announced layoffs. On MIPS’ side, the 75-plus job cuts will mostly impact analog positions and came as the company execs announced MIPS’ Chipidea merger isn’t going as smoothly as they had hoped, specifically on the sales end. Meanwhile, Rambus will cut 90 engineering and non-engineering jobs as it looks to recover from a $144.7 million Q2 loss. That whopper compares to a loss of $12.6 million in Q1 and a net loss of $2.7 million in Q2 2007.

Like everyone else in the electronics industry, Rambus blamed part of the loss on the economy. Adding a little fuel to that fire, Gartner this week warned of a coming widespread slowdown in the electronics sector, suggesting that the global economy will get worse before it gets better. The research company did so while saying it was “surprised” that the first-half semiconductor industry showed 5% growth. 

Know who else was surprised this week? Corning, which received an unsolicited mini-tender offer from a private equity firm. The company is fighting it. Cadence, meanwhile, withdrew its bid for Mentor Graphics. And Vishay put a $1.6 billion unsolicited bid out there, looking to buy power player International Rectifier.

Speaking of disputes and power, several tech companies and industry trade groups are arguing against a massive Southern California solar panel installation project that would provide enough energy to power 162,000 homes. In her PowerSource blog this week, EDN’s Margery Conner asked why anyone would try to stop the effort, especially when it doesn’t require environmental impact reports or installation of a new power transmission infrastructure, and with some retrofitting and strengthening, can be done over existing structures. Apparently some companies are concerned that the installation would give Edison too much of a monopoly on California's solar market. Seeing the huge green power opportunity here, Margery disagrees with the concern and says, “Let’s drop the headwind and let Edison get on with it.”

And, hey, sometimes you just have to give in for the greater good. That’s what Intel did this week when it released its Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB, which has strong industry support and which Intel had previously not favored. 

Busy as usual, Intel made to other announcements this week: One on Remote Wake, which allows PC users to remotely power up and retrieve files over an Internet connection; and two on Nehalem, in which the company began tagging some of the chip family with the “Intel Core” brand.

OK, so none of the Intel news was a major breakthrough. But perhaps what Stanford University's Nanofabrication Facility (SNF), Korea’s National NanoFab Center (NNFC), and BeSang Inc announced on the 3D IC front will prove to be. The 3D IC, which was processed on 8-inch wafers with industry standard 0.18-micron CMOS technologies both at NNFC and SNF, contains 128 million vertically oriented devices as a test vehicle and was processed at temperatures below 400 degree Celsius. Also, a sub-micron-thick single crystalline silicon layer was initially formed above the silicon substrate with two metal interconnect layers, followed by vertical devices and additional metal layer. According to the trio, the technology forms full 3D interconnects below and above the vertical devices, whereas conventional semiconductor technologies contain planar devices on the surface of the semiconductor substrate and interconnects only above the planar devices.

We’d be remiss not to mention the Olympics in today’s This week in gEEk post. After all, it’s the world’s major happening right now. The electronics industry enjoyed some growth leading up to the games, as consumers bought up LCD TVs, high-end handsets, and DVRs for watching and recording the events. Consumers like EDN’s Brian Dipert, who has been watching the Olympics and has been using the games as a test for his new Windows Vista Media Center, sharing all of the system’s glitches and his discovered workarounds in his Brian’s Brain blog.  
 
But what will the longer-term impact of the Olympics be on the semiconductor industry and business in Asia? Avnet’s Harley Feldberg wonders what affect Asia’s electronics supply chain will see at this critical time of the year for business there in this Q&A. 

And while the world’s top athletes continue their pursuit of the gold over the weekend and into next week, Credence continues to focus on its Diamond. As it and LTX rationalize product lines in light of the two companies plan to merge, Credence development is carrying on with instrumentation for the Diamond platform. The latest entry is the 72-channel HDVI (high density voltage/current) instrument, which is targeted at reducing the cost of test by enabling large numbers of sites to be tested in parallel. 

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

--Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News