semiconductors — GigaOM

semiconductors

Rising demand for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and handheld gaming devices will push mobile processor sales past the 4 billion mark by 2014, says In-Stat. But consumers and their devices don’t just want a mobile CPU; they want integrated mobile broadband connectivity too. Read More »

Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip maker is going to finally see its much vaunted Mirasol color displays come to market in early 2011. The displays were supposed to launch in 2010. Read More »

 
 

Intel has taken up a patriotic cause this year, paying special attention to promising U.S.-based companies. The company announced four software and chip companies that have collectively received over $30 million from its Intel Capital Invest in America Technology Fund, including an energy software maker. Read More »

For Intel, Big Week of Little Chips

Intel is all set for the latest edition of its Intel Developer Forum (IDF), a gathering of its partners and developers. The event starts today in earnest in San Francisco. Along with many announcements, expect details on USB 3.0 and a new chip architecture: Sandy Bridge. Read More »

ARM is introducing a new powerful chip architecture, Cortex-A15 which will target web servers and personal portable devices like the iPhones and iPads. The Cortex-A15 architecture is ideal for cloud clients connected via high speed wireless connections and is likely to give Intel some sleepless nights. Read More »

The z190, a brand new chip from IBM, runs at a breathtaking speed of 5.2 GHz and it is meant to power a new mainframe system that is trying to tame the flow of data emerging from modern enterprises and their customers. Read More »

Intel is buying Infineon’s wireless chip business for roughly $1.4 billion in cash. The new business will allow Intel to compete in the smartphone markets. But with WiMAX rollout not working out as planned, the deal is Intel’s plan B as LTE gains momentum. Read More »

iPhone 4 Sensors Highlight a Bright Spot for VCs

The fourth-generation iPhone launched yesterday, complete with several new microelectromechanical systems (MEMs), which are increasingly an integral part of our gadgets, translating the physical world into the digital one. That’s great for a variety of old-school semiconductor manufacturers as well as some later-stage startups. Read More »

Time to Cash in on Chips?

Wintegra, a chip startup, filed for a $115 million IPO last week, while Beceem a WiMAX radio provider, filed last month. In March, Max Linear, another semiconductor firm, successfully went public. Is this a silicon renaissance, or are VCs merely trying to clear their books? Read More »

Smooth-Stone Bets ARM Will Invade the Data Center

Intel, with its x86 architecture, has owned the corporate computing market for decades, but Barry Evans, CEO of Austin, Texas-based systems startup Smooth-Stone, thinks it’s time for a change. Evans is betting on ARM-based processors to “completely remove power as an issue in the data center.” Read More »

Mobile World Congress: Don't Call It a Phone Show

Over the last few years Mobile World Congress, the mobile phone industry trade show, has experienced a shift from being about mobile phones to being about always-on connectivity. Mobile broadband has changed the value of the mobile ecosystem and thus the players who care about it. Read More »

Things are looking dire for dead tree media of all sorts as the consumer electronics industry takes aim at newspapers, magazines, and the humble mass of paper known as a book. But between iPhones, dedicated e-readers and the much anticipated tablet, what does the consumer … Read More »

More Must Reads

While much has been made of Google’s Chrome OS and its potential, the adaptability of the Android OS is what makes it more disruptive than its shinier smartbook-oriented cousin Chrome. Its appeal to everyone from chipmakers to serial entreprenuers will be seen at CES. Read More »

Of all the connectivity technologies on the imminent horizon, USB 3.0 holds extraordinary promise. But although some devices based on it will debut at the upcoming CES show, we can’t herald the technology’s true arrival yet. Read More »

The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas, is rapidly approaching. Numerous important technologies — such as 802.11b, the first really widely adopted Wi-Fi standard — got their early boosts at the show. Here’s what to expect this time. Read More »

The phone of the the not-so-distant future will be better — but not much bigger — than today’s devices. Unlike many of today’s phones, it won’t sport a keyboard, will have more radios, and will be even better able to function as a portable computer. Read More »

Microsoft and Intel this summer both snapped up companies with technology that helps software developers build programs that take advantage of multicore chips. Last July I pulled together a list of five startups to watch in the multicore programming space, and prompted by Microsoft … Read More »

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., like many semiconductor companies, is on the lookout for new markets, and according to some reports, the company thinks it could generate more than $2 billion in revenue from opportunities that include solar and LEDs. The company’s not alone. The … Read More »

When it comes to all the gadget-y things that now fill up our world — from computers to mobile phones — we should thank Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the inventors of the integrated circuit. Fifty years ago today, while all of his colleagues were … Read More »

Despite reporting a second-quarter loss last night, due in part to costs associated with the faulty packaging on some of its chips placed in thousands of laptops, Nvidia still has a plan for semiconductor domination through the GPU. But if it wants to … Read More »

Elemental Technologies, a startup focused on faster transcoding, has raised $7.1 million from General Catalyst Partners and Voyager Capital. The company’s software uses the graphics processor rather than the CPU inside a computer to handle the work of ripping a DVD or video file to … Read More »

Sand 9, a Boston University spinoff, has received $8 million in a Series A round from Flybridge Capital Partners and General Catalyst Partners. An early-stage investment in a fabless chip company is notable, simply because there are fewer of them than ever. While the … Read More »

I wrote about an effort us use millions of specialized embedded processors to build an energy-efficient (relatively) supercomputer that could run at speeds of up to 200 petaflops over at Earth2Tech. The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has signed a partnership with chip … Read More »

The LG Secret launched today with a touch screen powered by Synaptics touch capacitors, a technology whose star has risen in the consumer devices universe in the wake of the iPhone. The iPhone uses a grid layout of capacitive sensors to enable multi-finger gestures, something … Read More »

I’ve been talking about the enormous amount of cash it takes to create any kind of chip company and expressing doubts about the number of startups we will see getting financial backing to create truly innovative ideas in semiconductors. Analyst Linley Gwennap apparently feels … Read More »

Last Friday, four executives of satellite holding company TerreStar Networks suddenly resigned, leaving just three people behind to fill the void. I don’t expect this lack of management to last for too long, but until TerreStar calls me back with details, I’m betting that … Read More »

The memory business is a volatile one, driven by consumer demand for products like MP3 players and rapid obsolescence. That’s why the gradual move of solid-state storage drives based on NAND flash memory into the PC is so interesting. Now that those drives are bigger, at … Read More »

Skyhook Wireless said today it will provide its Wi-Fi-based location awareness technology for users of Locr software who want to automatically add geographic information to their photos. Although fun, like many location-based services that have been long promised and poorly delivered, it’s certainly not the … Read More »

Earlier this month, Qualcomm and LSI Logic went on a nano-based shopping spree. LSI spent $4 billion and snapped up Agere Systems, a company that shared DNA with AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs. Qualcomm, which is well known for its CDMA and W-CDMA technologies, snapped … Read More »

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