This week in gEEk: Hot Chips, Hot Interconnects, and hotheads at Nvision

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

The industry heated up this week as we in the United States prepared to say goodbye to summer and usher in the Labor Day holiday weekend. Hot Chips, Hot Interconnects, and hotheads at Nvision made this last week in August a memorable one.

Outsourcing was one of the topics that steamed attendees at Hot Chips this week. As EDN’s Ron Wilson reported, as outsourcing matures, US job loses aren’t the only problems that have emerged. As Ron wrote in his blog, there are other problems emerging as well, that impact not just designers but the outcome of designs, and quite possibly the competitiveness of the companies that outsourced the work in the first place. Also discussed at the event were memory coherency over networks, IBM’s advice on low-power processor design,  and the hype that’s growing around photovoltaic power generation.

Meanwhile, at sister event Hot Interconnects kicked off at Stanford University by examining the growing challenge on chip interconnect technology as today’s small-scale multicore processors evolve into chips with tens or hundreds of processor cores. Day two saw Princeton, Oregon State University, and the University of Texas, Austin, jointly present a paper on a blend of conventional routing and fast global electrical lines to create a hybrid NoC (network on chip), arguing that there are two fundamentally different classes of problems in establishing a NoC for chips with large numbers of cores.

Arguments were also presented over in San Jose when a labor group protested Nvidia’s product failures. The labor group’s core issue with Nvidia vendor Aramark, however, and that got many EDN readers hot under the collar about the group’s presence at Nvision this week.

Broadcom felt heat, both good and bad, this week. News that its co-founder and former CTO Henry Samueli  wrote a letter of apology to the judge scheduled to sentence him regarding his lying to the SEC during its probe into the company’s stock-option-backdating practices followed its announced acquisition of AMD’s digital TV business. The near $193 million buy is expected to double Broadcom’s revenue from DTV.  

Broadcom also saw its rival Qualcomm in some hot water this week when a federal judge announced the company was in contempt of a 3G injunction concerning Broadcom patents.

In even hotter water, though, are UMC Chairman Stan Hung and some Bloomberg reporters. Hung is reportedly the target of an insider-trading investigation regarding his alleged personal purchases of ProMOS Technologies shares in 2006, just before the foundry took a significant stake in the DRAM maker. The investigation prompted Taiwan prosecutors to raid UMC’s offices on Wednesday.  Separately, Bloomberg’s newswire landed in hot water this week after it mistakenly posted its incomplete obituary for Steve Jobs, leading some to wonder if the Apple co-founder had passed away (rest assured, Apple fans, he’s not).

Speaking of hot water, EDN’s Paul Rako this week discussed a hypothesis that uses a car’s alternator to disassociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then sends the gas to the engine so as to improve mileage.

Solar still remains the hot topic when it comes to power sourcing, but not everyone is for the alternative energy. As EDN’s Margery Conner wrote in her blog, it seems that politicians at the local level in California are concerned that state tax breaks will preclude a county from getting its part of the energy projects tax pie.  

When will politicians learn that you just can’t control everything? Someone should really set an example. Don’t look to IBM to do that, though, as the company this week furthered the development of carbon nanotube transistor devices by controlling the light emission from a nanotube, and by manipulating and directing light from a single carbon nanotube. Big Blue said its researchers achieved this development by combining a single nanotube-based field-effect-transistor with a pair of metallic nano-mirrors on a chip, and controlling optical emission properties from the nanotube, including emission wavelength and distribution of emitted light.

Have something to say on the above noted happenings? Share your comments on this week’s news and analysis below. And to all of our US-based readers, have a great three-day weekend!

–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News