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Jul 25 2008 11:42AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN's short review of the week's happenings.

ARM and MIPS should be preparing for war after Intel this week announced its re-entry into the high-end, application-specific microcontroller market with a line of Pentium- and Atom-based chips known as the 80579 family. Combining a single processor-core complex, North- and South-bridge functions, application-specific peripheral blocks, and in some cases an application accelerator, the chips in the family will create an x86-instruction-set alternative to the rainbow of ARM- and MIPS-based SOCs, at least for systems that can tolerate the considerable power and memory footprint involved.

And while one war is just beginning, Nokia and Qualcomm were ending theirs. The two competitors this week inked a 15-year licensing agreement, a peace treaty of sorts, covering various standards including GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMAX, and LTE that results in the end of all litigation between them. Why did the two mobile device market rivals decide to make nice? We'd like to say it was just good karma on their parts, but the pressure has been on Nokia and Qualcomm since February when a judge "urged" them to start negotiating.

A start-up company know as CherryPal, meanwhile, has challenged the PC industry's dogma, announcing a $249, paperback-sized desktop "PC" that runs Linux, leverages a small amount of onboard flash memory plus online storage, boots in 20 seconds, and consumes a mere 2W—97% less than a typical desktop.

But don't worry about the HP, Dell, and the other established PC OEMs. Preliminary estimates from Gartner this week peg Q2 PC demand at up 16% year over year. Gartner reports that low ASPs (average selling prices) helped spur consumers into action, but we have to wonder if consumers were instead spurred by Microsoft's Vista push. No, no, we're not suggesting consumers were out buying PCs for Vista; we think they may have been trying to avoid Vista. Demand for Windows XP-based PCs was surely high as time ticked away in Q2, which closed June 30, also the date beyond which Microsoft will no longer license XP through most sales channels as it attempts to drive demand for the disappointing OS.  

Speaking of disappointments, have you been following the June quarter earnings? The economy may not be hurting the PC industry, but it sure is pounding on some electronics industry financials. For example, Freescale and STMicroelectronics this week reported modest revenue and earnings, that is, if one ignores certain expenses and special charges.

And when revenue and earnings are hurting, it's pretty safe to assume that capital spending won't be growing. That concerns market researchers at IC Insights, who warned that, considering the strong unit growth rates being seen in memory and logic ICs, there simply isn't much wiggle room for additional cuts in capital spending budgets at most chipmakers.

Worse yet (worse, at least, for those employed here in the United States) is that we all know what tight budgets are likely to lead to: more manufacturing outsourcing. Tight budgets could also continue to encourage the semiconductor industry toward the fabless business model. Gartner suggested the continued industry movement to fab-lite or asset-lite models plays directly into the hands of the semiconductor assembly and test services (SATS) companies, with the net result that foundry and SATS outsourcing services will grow faster than the overall semiconductor industry.

With or without the two research items, Agilent identified a growth opportunity and teamed up to get in on the ground floor. Answering the call of industry experts, clamoring for suitable test capability, the test and measurement kingpin partnered with picoChip and mimoOn to test a 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) LTE femtocell reference design.

A separate and long-awaited wireless partnership came about this week when the WiMedia Alliance and Swiss-based standards development consortium Ecma International announced they will collaborate on future UWB standards. According to the plan, WiMedia will continue to play its current role of pre-standardization research, polling of member organizations, and post-standardization certification and marketing activities. Ecma will work in parallel with WiMedia on crafting the standards, then submit them to its own voting process. This two-track approach is expected to produce standards that are genuinely global and that carry the ISO imprimatur.

And again, that's according to the plan. Sometimes even the best laid partnership plans fall through. Then again, sometimes they prove to be stellar opportunities. Pardon our shameless plug, but EDN, which partnered with Electronic News and Electronic Business in 2007 to deliver you, our dear readers, a complete and consolidated Web site for electronics design, news, and strategy, Thursday was awarded by the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) with Honorable Mention in the "Web Site of the Year" category. Further, EDN's Brian's Brain blog received a Gold award in the ASBPE's "Overall B2B Blog" category and EDN's Electronic News Today e-newsletter received a Bronze award in the ASBPE's "E-Newsletter: Breaking News" category. EDN congratulates its staff and all of the ASBPE award winners on their significant achievements.