This week in gEEk: Stocks sink; embedded designs shrink; solar marketing sludge

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

It’s going to be a bad weekend for Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang and AMD’s Hector Ruiz. Both CEO’s saw their company’s sink to new stock lows this week and angry investors want their heads on a stick.

After Nvidia cut its quarterly outlook last week and announced a $150 million to $200 million charge on product failure issues, Rambus announced a patent suit against the company one day after its stock, NVDA, sank to a new 12-moth low.

AMD, meanwhile, announced nearly $1 billion in charges, most of which came from its ATI acquisition. In an SEC filing this morning, AMD said elements of the GPU maker buy “have not performed in accordance with the company’s expectations.” This news came a day after AMD’s stock hit a new 16-year low Thursday and came just days after Intel bumped AMD out of a 3-D partnership with DreamWorks.

If you work for Siemens, your weekend might not be a happy one, either. Economic pressures forced the Germany-based conglomerate to announce a 4% layoff, or 16,750 job cuts, as it looks to save $1.9 billion. Of the total job cuts, 1,800 impact engineering positions.

But of you work for Apple, put a smile on your face as you walk out the door this afternoon. Hordes of crowds lined up this morning to get their hands on the iPhone 3G. Odds are, if you are one of our EE readers, you’re more interested in what’s inside the handheld than its new features. Check out EDN’s Brian’s Brain blog for some teardown analysis and see what companies’ technology got some play in the second-generation iPhone.  

Greenpeace, unlike EDN’s Brian Dipert, didn’t wait for a teardown to comment on the iPhone’s contents. The environmental group this week suggested the G in 3G wouldn’t also stand for green and speculated on chemical and material use in the handset.

Toyota revved up its green engines this week, announcing the availability of solar panels on its Prius. But, as EDN’s Margery Conner points out in our PowerSource blog, the solar play is more a way for Toyota to snag some green from consumer wallets than it is a green energy play. According to her calculations, the panels would provide just 10% of the power needed to run the Prius’ air conditioning. (Nice try Toyota, but your marketing sludge doesn’t stick to our engineer-based edit staff!)

Intel invested about $38 million in Germany-based solar module maker Sulfurcell and EDN’s Ann Mutschler suggested that the markets outside the United States may hold more solar promise than our market here based on the economic situation and our shrinking available investment. 

Speaking of shrinking, as new embedded designs combine highly integrated silicon, portable platforms, and soaring data rates, the industry is adopting smaller form factors that emphasize cooling, reliability, and performance. And with new, smaller size requirements, embedded-system designers are turning to pre-engineered, off-the-shelf modules that integrate the latest CPU technology with standard peripherals. EDN looks at the major board standards, conflicting measures, and how the industry is reacting in this story from our Thursday print issue.

Of course, technologies aren’t the only things shrinking. Sadly, so are ASPs (average selling prices). As Gartner noted this week, because many OEMs capitalized on lower-priced semiconductors in 2007, their semiconductor consumption did not grow as fast as their revenues.  

Meanwhile, ASPs are severely hurting R&D spending. IC Insights said this week that it expects an upward R&D spending trend to continue into the next decade, even though R&D expenditures this year are forecast to rise by just 8% to $49.2 billion due to some IC makers attempting to curb spending and transfer some development activities to third-party foundries.

Sensor-rich designs are also on an upswing. Designers are singing the praises of sensors and intelligent processing, which they have added to fill the holes in their end-system capabilities and which have yielded designs that cost less to produce and operate.

Our staff here isn’t singing with praise when it comes to USB mics and adapters, though.  Nor are they very optimistic the music industry in general.

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