The resulting chips should find homes in high-performance computing, networking, gaming and other applications that require fast access to data stored in memory. And they should appear in physical products by the first half of next year. Eventually, this will have applications in cloud computing and even data analysis. According to the consortium, a single HMC offers a 15x performance increase and uses 70 percent less energy per bit when compared to today’s memory.

When I covered the launch of the effort in 2011, I explained the problem this new chip would solve:

The chip industry is really good at making a CPU that does calculations faster, but it hasn’t been able to make memory chips fast and dense enough to feed the cores enough information to keep up with the CPU’s capabilities. So what chips are left with is a massively large brain that stands idle sometimes while it waits for information to come to it. That idle time burns power and reduces the overall performance of a computer — and it’s becoming a bigger deal as both power and performance are being pushed to the edge.

Since that story was written, the consortium — founded by Samsung and Micron — has grown to more than 100 companies. The members now include big name vendors and users such as ARM, IBM, Microsoft, SK Hynix and HP as well as many smaller and specialty chip firms. The details of the announcement today are about how other chips will connect with the hybrid memory cube.

The structure of the chip is very different from traditional densely-packed DRAM modules. It’s stacked, which is a common way chipmakers have tried to pack in more memory — but instead of stacking the DRAM and connecting it via interconnects on the outside of the chip, the HMC has holes through the module with nanowires connecting the memory modules.

This process, known as Through Silicon Vias or TSV is of growing interest in the industry as it slogs down the path of making 3-D chips. But anytime you change a core silicon element significantly you have to figure out a lot of things –from the hardware layer all the way up to the applications. Today’s spec details how things will shunt bits to and from the hybrid memory cube. From the release:

“The achieved specification provides an advanced, short-reach (SR) and ultra short-reach (USR) interconnection across physical layers (PHYs) for applications requiring tightly coupled or close-proximity memory support for FPGAs, ASICs and ASSPs, such as high-performance networking, and test and measurement. The next goal for the consortium is to further advance standards designed to increase data rate speeds for SR from 10, 12.5 and 15Gb/s up to 28Gb/s. Speeds for USR interconnections will be driven from 10 up to 15Gb/s. The next level of specification is projected to gain consortium agreement by the first quarter of 2014.”

In short, the HMC will support 10 gigabit per second data rates at a minimum for both when they are the same board (short reach) and when they are packed even more tightly (around two to three inches) and get faster over time. Wicked fast.

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To build the internet of things we’re going to need a lot of chips — orders of magnitude more than we have in use today. Generally those chips will fall into three categories, and each of those categories is poised to become a booming business with a lot of volume and room to grow. Let’s break it down:

Connectivity: This one is a no-brainer. If we want things to connect to the internet, we’re going to have to put radios in them. It may be Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-wave, ZigBee or even a 3G or 4G cellular standard (or all of the above) but there has been and will continue to be a land grab for radios among the big chip companies. The rise of connected devices is the reason Qualcomm bought Atheros back in 2011 and the reason little known microcontroller company Atmel purchased Ozmo Devices in December.

We’ll also see new products aimed at integrating radios together, not just from Broadcom — the king of radio integration — but also smaller companies such as Redpine Signals, Altair and others. And these radios will be going into more devices. Just a quick scan of Kickstarter or Indiegogo shows a plethora of home gateways, Wi-Fi enabled devices and sensors that have radios integrated from a variety of vendors. A report from the OECD on the internet of things estimates that a family of four will go from having an average of 10 devices connected to the internet now to 25 in 2017 and 50 by 2022. Every single on of those will have a radio — or multiple radios.

Control: These chips are the brains of the operation. But unlike in the personal computer or server market, where Intel and AMD fought for dominance (more truthfully, AMD tried to at least achieve profitability), or the smartphone market where Qualcomm has taken out competitors ranging from Texas Instruments and Freescale on the application processor side (leaving Apple, Samsung, Broadcom and Mediatek standing), this market has a much wider variety of players known for their embedded processors and microcontroller. The one name that spans all of these industries is ARM.

At the low end, microcontrollers can range from 8-bit processors that manage setting on your microwave to higher-end chips inside a set-top box. Companies like Freescale, Texas Instruments, Atmel, Intel and STMicroelectronics all are pushing their microcontrollers (MCUs) inside the internet of things. The variety of use cases and devices inside connected devices mean some gadgets will need more power savings than performance or merely just a cheap 32-bit chips designed for a more industrial application. Many of these companies have an advantage for the internet of things because they are used to supporting a wide variety of end products with their firmware and sales teams.

They have designed their chips to be modular. If the bigger players want to play here they will have to build out multiple lines of chips with differing performance specs that can be supported across a wide range of end devices. That’s very different from building out a line of chips with slightly different specs all designed for servers. I bet a few of the big vendors, especially on the connectivity side, might try to acquire this knowledge.

Botanicalls moisture sensing system.

And since many of these sensors will be integrated onto small packages with radios and maybe even MCUs there will be a lot of value for a company that can pop all of the above onto a system on a chip — it’s cheaper, smaller and more power efficient. So consolidation will happen within these categories as well as across them as more devices get online and we ask them to share more information about their environment.

So be they MEMs, microcontrollers or radios, there’s a lot of silicon (or maybe gallium arsenide) inside the internet of things. And the types of chips required will stretch the silicon industry — that has been primarily focused on keeping up with the performance requirements of Moore’s Law — into new directions. Power savings, integration and size will matter when it comes to connected devices more so than the all out race for performance that has dominated the chip industry for decades.

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What Gartner’s calculations found mean that Apple is no longer the world’s biggest spender on semiconductors. However, lower spending doesn’t necessarily mean Apple is buying fewer chips. It could be that Apple is getting better deals on them, or it could have to do with the type of chips it is buying versus what Samsung is. Here’s how the two rank among the rest of the world’s biggest spenders on semiconductors:

Because they are pricier, PC chips are still providing the bulk of the demand for semiconductors, according to Gartner. But as that market continues to shrink, it led to an overall down year for chip purchases. Demand for chips actually shrank 3 percent in 2012, but was helped out by Samsung and Apple’s seemingly insatiable appetite for semiconductors. Together the two accounted for 15 percent of semiconductor spending as they duke it out over the future of consumer mobile devices.

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What IBM has done is place a channel capable of guiding light on an everyday chip with the addition of only a few steps and equipment in the manufacturing process — speeding up the potential communications on the chips and even between chips. It’s also chosen to build the chips at 90 nanometers, an older technology that means fabrication plants will have the capacity to make these new semiconductors. Making a semiconductor involves several steps where materials are deposited on a wafer and then etched away according to a set pattern. It’s like building a layer cake with equipment that can costs hundred of millions of dollars.

But this equipment is already there and even some of the most expensive elements of it — the masks that set the patterns of the chips — are set to stay the same under IBM’s breakthrough. Solomon Assefa, a researcher at IBM, says that putting the nanophotonics on the chips will require the additional of germanium as well as deeper box on the chip where the optical components will reside.

However it still uses the conventional CMOS manufacturing which lowers the cost of manufacturing on-chip optics and helps make the chip suitable for applications such as the data center. In 2010 IBM piloted this technology and now it is ready to actually start building the chips. From the release:

“IBM’s CMOS nanophotonics technology demonstrates transceivers to exceed the 25Gbps data rate. In addition, the technology is capable of feeding a number of parallel optical data streams into a single fiber by utilizing compact on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing devices. The ability to multiplex large data streams at high data rates will allow future scaling of optical communications capable of delivering terabytes of data between distant parts of computer systems.”

Assefa couldn’t share IBM’s go-to-market strategy around the chips but expects the technology to handle everything from on-chip networking in high-performance computing and in big data processing workloads as well as speeding communications between data centers. That’s a pretty wide range of partners that IBM would work with to commercialize this technology.

Others are also trying to develop technologies here from Kotura and Luxtera to Lightwire, which was purchased by Cisco. Other companies, aren’t waiting for on-chip optics and are embedding fiber into top-of-rack switches. Using pulses of light to send information means more energy-efficient networking gear, no need for interconnects and much faster speeds that eliminate current bottleneck in higher performance computing and data analytics applications.

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This brings Qualcomm up to the third largest chipmaker in the world for 2012 and shows how the shift to mobile devices and consolidation in the server and PC market has changed the fortunes of the chip industry’s biggest players. So while Intel is still the top chipmaker in the world, it is expected to see its sales decline by 2.4 percent, roughly in line with the chip industry as a whole. Of course, with an anticipated $47.54 billion in sales and a whopping 15.7 percent of the overall chip market this isn’t surprising.

Qualcomm’s growth came off of a much smaller base to reach an anticipated $10.2$12.98 billion in sales. Other notable bits from the IHS rankings include Samsung still at the No. 2 spot and experiencing growth above and beyond the overall industry thanks to its share in Samsung-LED. LED lighting and certain sensor components grew this year as well. Broadcom and Nvidia should also see higher percentage growth while both Texas Instruments, Freescale and AMD were the biggest losers. IHS iSuppli expects this downturn to be short-lived as long as the global economy continues to stabilize. It anticipates growth in 2013 to hit 8 percent.

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From the release sharing the news:

“I’ve been privileged to lead one of the world’s greatest companies,” Otellini said. “After almost four decades with the company and eight years as CEO, it’s time to move on and transfer Intel’s helm to a new generation of leadership. I look forward to working with Andy, the board and the management team during the six-month transition period, and to being available as an advisor to management after retiring as CEO.”

Intel CEO Paul Otellini

It’s worth noting that Otellini is retiring at age 62 ahead of Intel’s general retirement age of 65. Otellini has had several roles inside Intel, and was only the fifth CEO at Intel since the chip firm was founded in 1968. While at Intel Otellini helped convince Apple to replace the Power PC chips inside its MacBooks with Intel processors. He also presided over Intel’s $1.25 billion settlement with AMD over allegations that Intel was abusing its power in the marketplace.

However, as the world increasingly went mobile, Intel has seen some of its power recede. It has adopted new form factors — remember the ultrabook? — but not new processor architectures. Instead, it tried to force the x86 architecture into a lower-power chip, which gave us the Atom chips. It also bought the wireless business of Infineon with the hopes of creating an integrated application processor and radio chips similar to what Qualcomm offers in the mobile space.

Currently the Motorola Razr i has an Intel-based application processor, the first mass market smartphone to have such silicon. But its success in this area is not assured.

The changing chip ecosystem

Earlier this month Qualcomm’s market cap surpassed Intel’s in what many people saw as an example of the mobile dominance over PC. But Intel is facing threats in the data center and high performance computing worlds as well. As far back as 2008 Intel tried to develop an x86-based graphics processor aimed at high performance computing, but its Larrabee efforts failed. It went back to the drawing board and is seeing some success with its new Xeon: Phi architecture, which is in a few of the Top 500 supercomputers and has the potential to keep Intel competitive in the market for massively parallel computing.

But at the other end of the data center spectrum Intel may have already lost. Efforts to use so-called “wimpy cores” — which offer less performance but sip very little energy — inside servers has opened up the data center to ARM-based chips. Even AMD, the only other holder to the x86 license, has taken an ARM license to make servers using ARM-based chips. That’s not to say Intel’s market share in the enterprise computing market will go away, just that there’s a much wider array of processors out there that infrastructure architects are eyeing for their computing jobs.

And that will change the economics of the chip business for Intel. Where it was once the keeper of the only game in town for mainstream corporate and consumer compute (yes, Sun and IBM have alternative architectures, but x86 was the mainstream) there are now multiple options for server makers and their end-customers. Many of those end-customers are even bypassing the server makers and have crazy ideas about renting CPUs and changing up board designs, that Intel will have to listen to.

What is core to the business?

So as Otellini leaves, his successor will have to adapt not only to more competition but also a different style of competition. ARM licenses its IP and thus, many different companies are innovating on that architecture competing on both price and features. Intel has some of the smartest software and hardware designers in the world but they will be competing more closely against outside firms on features, and Intel’s sales staff will have far more competition on price. They will also have different customers — both server makers and end users.

Aside from the competition angle, there’s Intel’s business model at the moment. Intel makes its own chips, conducts billions of dollars in R&D to keep Moore’s Law (named after Intel’s founder Gordon Moore) going and has to sell enough products at a high enough price to support its multi-billion manufacturing operation. Unlike Samsung, it doesn’t make chips for other companies, but that may be changing. In February Intel began a pilot effort to open up its manufacturing facilities for other types of chips

The opportunities presented by the changes in the chip world are incredible, and Intel has resources that few other competitors possess, which means that the right leader could take this role and use it to remake a chip powerhouse for the next decade. Our need for computing is only expanding, it’s just that the nature of our computing has become both more varied and the competition more fierce. The next big opportunities in chips aren’t in general purpose anything, so where will that leave Intel and x86?

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Chip company AMD said its sales would come in 10 percent lower in the third quarter compared with sales the previous quarter. The news, which was released on Thursday evening was a shocking decline from AMD’s previously announced expectations that third quarter sales would decline by 1 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, sequentially.

AMD blamed its troubles on the macroeconomic environment, which has hurt chip sales, and others are blaming it on yesterday’s reported decline in PC sales. Intel and ARM are also leery about the sales environment. But what’s happening here goes beyond AMD’s refusal to embrace mobile a few years back, and beyond worries about a European decline. Thanks to ubiquitous broadband at home and via mobile devices as well as an increasing reliance on the internet, chip firms are embracing heterogeneity in their product lines.

From one competitor and strict product divisions to a free-for all.

Phones, tablets and netbooks! Oh my!

So while an overall decline is sales is occurring, and the PC market is clearly hurting as numbers from Gartner and iSuppli yesterday show, the big picture is that we’re going from two separate architectures locked into a defined space to more architectures and many vendors in a free-for-all.

This isn’t a binary competition either between ARM and x86. Because ARM licenses its IP to a variety of vendors we’re also seeing companies such as Apple, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and others innovate and offer different features, designs and price points. On the server side ARM is making progress with vendors and we’ll see ARM-based servers in production by the end of the year. There are other new architectures out there for processing big data that are also gaining ground. Tilera, a maker of a RISC-based many-core chip has silicon running in production on a few thousand servers today.

How this macro-shift plays out in today’s world

• On Wednesday an analyst downgraded Qualcomm because of looming competition from Intel in the market for mobile chips, because Intel is prepping a combo chip that has both an Atom processor and baseband chip to act as a radio. Qualcomm has owned that market for years, but after Intel’s purchase of Infineon back in 2011, Intel may become more of a threat.
• Apple’s A6 chip inside the iPhone 5 contains a custom-build Apple CPU. This may add fuel to the almost ever-present rumors that Apple might dump Intel chips in its MacBooks for its own chips.
• ARM this week unveiled a built a networking layer into its designs aimed at the server market trying to deliver the kind of fast IO that servers need.
• In June AMD and ARM created a group of companies called the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture Foundation, pushing for new software for this heterogeneous world. Qualcomm last week joined that group, which gives it far more credibility.

What’s next?

So right now, chip firms are lowering their sales expectations, writing down excess inventory and keeping an eye on the global economic picture. But they are also taking strategic steps such as the creation of the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture Foundation and integrating other types of chips with their core products as Nvidia and Intel are doing.

The way we access computing has changed as people have gone mobile, while on the back end the architecture is also undergoing its own shift to deliver the type of web-based services we want and need. It would be suicide if the chip firms whose products are the basic building block of computation didn’t adapt. As they do, keep an eye on the average selling price of chips (I expect them to drop in a competitive environment) as well as how these players take on the next big disruption coming to the computing and chip space — the Internet of Things.

At that point it won’t be Intel versus Qualcomm, but ARM trying to take market share from Freescale and major firms prowling around for buys in the microcontroller, timing and maybe even embedded OS sector. What’s happened so far as Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, notes, is that computing cycles that were once limited to desktops and servers have become continuous throughout the day and over multiple devices. This occurred in part because of the adoption of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS helped unify the once-fragmented mobile OS market.

Moorhead expects that trend to continue even further as we connect more and more devices to the Internet. And none of the big giants in the chip world are going to let that opportunity go.

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The chip world is close to hitting a wall because cramming billions of transistors on something that’s smaller than your fingernail is really hard. But it can and is done by the chip industry every single day. What’s harder though is breaking the laws of physics in order to keep piling those transistors onto ever smaller chips, but if we want our devices to get smarter, faster and cheaper that may be what we have to do.

For example, Intel is currently making its fastest chips with line widths of 22 nanometers but has plans to get down to five nanometers (the smaller those line widths, the more transistors you can put on the chip). To get to the 22 nanometer point required Intel researchers to re-invent the transistor, which took Intel scientists a decade. Like, I said. This is hard.

IBM also makes chips and has its own R&D efforts aimed at keeping the cheaper and faster curve enabled by Moore’s Law going. But before it (or Intel) can go breaking the laws of physics, scientists have to have the tools to know what the heck they are doing, which is why IBM’s announcement today is such a big deal.

Individual molecular bonds seen by IBM’s new microscopy technique.

IBM’s atomic force microscopy technique will allow researchers see the chemical bonds between carbon atoms and eventually the bonds between atoms in manufactured sheets of carbon called graphene. For chipmakers, graphene is emerging as a possible replacement for silicon in some areas, although it’s far too early to tell. Plenty of universities and white coated folks in corporate labs are playing around with getting graphene hoping for a breakthrough that could lead to better wireless radios, more efficient solar panels, better batteries, new displays and even faster CPUs.

From IBM’s release:

The individual bonds between carbon atoms in such molecules differ subtly in their length and strength. All the important chemical, electronic, and optical properties of such molecules are related to the differences of bonds in the polyaromatic systems. Now, for the first time, these differences were detected for both individual molecules and bonds. This can increase basic understanding at the level of individual molecules, important for research on novel electronic devices, organic solar cells, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). In particular, the relaxation of bonds around defects in graphene as well as the changing of bonds in chemical reactions and in excited states could potentially be studied.

So while you may never need to use an atomic force microscope (it has a tip that is terminated with a single carbon monoxide molecule!) rest assured that a crew of researchers are diligently playing with it in the hopes that your 2025 mobile phone has a sweet display and a longer-lasting battery.

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Zplasma, a startup spun out of the University of Washington, hopes that its ability to harness super hot, stable plasma to make light will help the semiconductor industry continue its march to cram more transistors on a chip. Zplasma’s breakthrough is the shorter wavelength of light it can generate using plasma. At shorter wavelengths, the light generated by one of the machines used in making a chip can penetrate deeper into the chemicals deposited onto a wafer and etch finer lines on semiconductors — the finer the lines, the more transistors are able to fit.

From the University of Washington story on the Zplasma:

The industry has determined that the future standard for making microchips will be 13.5-nanometer light, a wavelength less than 1/14 the current size that should carry the industry for years to come. Such extreme ultraviolet light can be created only from plasmas, which are high-temperature, electrically charged gases in which electrons are stripped from their nuclei. … Light produced through techniques now being considered by the chip industry generate a spark that lasts just 20 to 50 nanoseconds. Zplasma’s light beam lasts 20 to 50 millionths of a second, about 1,000 times longer.

The technology produces finer lines, and the longer amount of time that the light is on is key in moving the wafer down the chip manufacturing line. It’s the difference between a dot matrix printer and a laser printer in terms of speed. The UW report notes that Zplasma is looking for additional investment from someone or an entity that understands the industry, and explains the tech in more detail. Or you can watch the video below.

I find myself intrigued by the idea of harnessing plasma for extreme ultraviolet lithography, although other technologies such as nano imprinting may also become the successor to etching, despite the billions invested in extreme ultraviolet lithography. Plus, the etching issue is only one of the problems that faces the chip industry as we attempt to cram more transistors onto the wafer. The leakage of power from one closely packed transistor to another is a problem, as are the on-chip communications between more transistors.

So while this tech looks pretty cool — really, anything involving superheated plasma is pretty cool (or hot) — it won’t cure all the woes of chip firms trying to keep Moore’s Law — which says that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months or so — alive. But at least it joins the ranks of those who are trying.

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Applied Materials on Wednesday introduced a new machine that could help meet our demand for cheap, small Flash memory by reconceptualizing how chips are built. The machine will enable chipmakers to build memory chips that are constructed upwards like a multi-story building as opposed to on a flat surface. They new chips would also be a significant advancement over the 3-D transistors that Intel is building today.

Applied Materials expects the chips to be in devices the end of 2014 at the earliest — evolutions in chips take a long, long time to get to the end user. But the promise of this machine, and the subsequent ability of those that use it to build chips, is that they will be able to stack many layers of multi-cell flash memory on one chip. That’s one way to keep pushing chip architecture down the cost curve enabled by Moore’s Law.

And that means it may be possible to build terabyte or petabyte memory that can fit into a mobile phone or tablet without resorting to expensive and exotic alternatives. So today’s 64GB iPad may soon get higher-end cousins that can store even more memories and games on the tablet — if we don’t all run to the cloud with our content first.

I thought we already had 3-D chips

The chips that Applied envisions for its customers (folks that run big chip manufacturing plants such as Samsung, TSMC and even Intel) will have several layers of multicell memory on a chip — the resulting structure actually looks more like a pyramid because the stair-step design is the easiest way for the elements on the chip to connect in order to communicate between cells.

Other 3-D chips such as the Intel tri-gate transistors or even the alternative designs put forth by IBM and others, are kind of 3-D, but not fully. In their case, the transistors are layered on top of the chip and then that layer is pushed up like a wrinkle in fabric giving the transistors more surface area. But in the Applied model (which has backers at Samsung and Toshiba) the transistors are actually stacked in layers on a chip. The difference in significant in terms of how much memory you can cram onto the chip.

The Applied model is also different from other innovations in memory technology where the chips themselves are stacked, like the announcement from Intel and Micron last December on their new stacks that will enable 128 GB of storage on devices.

The road goes on forever but the cost efficiencies end.

The problem with many of these other methods is they can add more memory, but at a greater costs. In some cases, the amount of technology can lead to more manufacturing defects or chips that consume too much power or space. Applied (and some of its customers) believe that the only way to go to keep adding density without overwhelming costs (or making giant chips) is to build up.

And thus, the idea of these skyscraper chips, which Brad Howard, head of advanced technology, etch business unit with Applied, says are coming. He noted that right now an undisclosed number of its customers are testing the new Centura Avatar machine in pilot lines in their chip plants and thinks that roughly around the time when we try to jam a terabyte of memory into a cell-phone-sized package, it will become more cost effective to build up in layers as opposed to stacking chips or adding wrinkles to our flash chips. If he’s right, then the skyscraper era will begin.

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