Now Hear This!

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

Ever hear the phrase, “keep your words soft and sweet just in case you have to eat them"? It’s one MEMC is very familiar with. The company cautiously maintained its Q3 outlook this week, despite analysts cheering it on. You can’t blame CEO Nabeel Gareeb for warning of “the potential for unanticipated events.” So far this year MEMC saw polysilicon production disruptions at its Pasadena, Texas, plant when an accidental chemical leak occurred in August and when a tropical storm hit in April. MEMC also cited softness in demand from semiconductor applications customers.

That softness may indeed be true, but overall capacity utilization remains high at 89%, as July semiconductor sales grew 2.8% month over month to $22.2 billion on consumer electronics, PCs, and cell phones, according to SIA data. For the second quarter of this year, SIA reported significant crossover from 200-mm to 300-mm production as 300-mm for the first time accounted for the largest share of wafer manufacturing capacity and actual wafers processed, with 44% of total capacity and 47% of total silicon processed.

SIA further reported that sales of DRAMs and NAND flash memory continued to decline as a result of continuing price erosion. Shocker, right? There may be light at the end of the tunnel, though. Reports out this morning of a possible Samsung acquisition of SanDisk were viewed as positive by analysts who believe this type of merger and acquisition activity could be taken as a sign of the nearing of the memory bottom and could ease flash oversupply issues. 

Is innovation in Silicon Valley nearing its bottom? A new book says yes; EDN’s Paul Rako says no. Paul makes his point in this blog post, where the debate is continuing in its comments field.

The debate is also continuing as to AMD’s manufacturing plans. One analyst this week reported that his sources say the company will detail its fab-lite plans in the next two weeks and will spin off its Dresden fabs in doing so. While other industry watchers have stated such a move would be counterintuitive,  the analyst supports it and the 45-nm process technology he believes the spun off fabs would gain from AMD partner IBM.

It’s good to have friends like IBM. Arrow could stand for that. The electronics distributor this week inked a Poland hardware solutions deal with Big Blue. Also shaking hands were IMEC and Plextronics, which teamed for organic solar cell inks and materials. The duo’s goal: To develop organic multi-junction solar cells with efficiency of 10% by 2012 as they focus on up-scaling the process to achieve a large-area industrial manufacturing technology with an average efficiency of about 7% and solar cell lifetime of five years.

Dow Corning also shined its light on solar this week, announcing a new silicone-based material that provides higher watt efficiency, longer module life, and optimum UV resistance, and is expected to lower the cost of solar power.

Solar wasn’t all that shined this week. You couldn’t tune into any media without seeing the glare of Google’s Chrome. While mainstream publications touted the Internet Explorer challenger, we took a deeper look. Brian Dipert, a season engineer and EDN’s consumer electronics guru, tossed Chrome on to his MacBook and took the browser for a spin. What’s tarnishing Chrome? Read on for his reflections on the browser.

Meanwhile, TI was testing the test waters this week. Aiming to drive development and ratification of the IEEE 1149.7 embedded system standard, the company detailed a two-pin compact test and debug solution meant to reduce strict pin-count, package size, and power constraints. Also in test, Teradyne announced it will pay $250 million for Eagle Test Systems, as consolidation in the ATE industry continues.

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