When Semico released our e-reader report, one of the predictions we made was that Amazon would introduce an updated Kindle this quarter.  They were right on track and are estimating new orders will ship September 10th.  This was a highly anticipated step, considering all the new competition and great products being [...]

There was a time when nothing was hipper than Apple—it had colors when others were grappling with grayscale,  a sense of style that was way out front, and mice when the rest of the world was stuck on “chicklet keyboards”—but gradually computing shifted. Due to wide adoption of the PCI bus family, the PC industry [...]

A few years ago we ditched our cable subscription. At the time we were constantly annoyed at how often we missed the shows we wanted to watch, and were uninterested in the shows that we were available to watch. The $60 a month seemed like a waste of money –no one in my house was [...]

If you’ve ever been in a hospital bed, or seen a loved one in a hospital bed, hooked up to a cluster of electronic sensors; the thought has to have crossed your mind, “A person could get a bad electrical shock from one of those.”  Analog Devices has introduced a low cost solution to help [...]

Pinyon Technologies, a Reno, Nevada company, provides antenna solutions that can increase gain by as much as three or four times, compared to a dipole antenna.  This offers the opportunity to significantly increase range, decrease battery power or trade off range against power requirements in Bluetooth, UWB, Zigbee, DECT, Wi-Fi, WiMAX or other [...]

An electronic control system for Formula One cars that Freescale Semiconductor is developing in collaboration with McLaren Electronic Systems puts Freescale in the forefront of hybrid electric vehicle technology development.
“Racing improves the breed,” is a saying first applied to horses.  It was carried over to automobiles, but in recent years it has hardly seemed to [...]

Next week Intel will be presenting several papers at the IEDM in San Francisco. Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow and some of the research team previewed three of the topics being presented. The common theme through all three papers reflects Intel’s drive to push conventional technology as far as it will possibly go. [...]

On 12/04/08, NXP Semiconductor announced their new, single-chip LCD TV platform, the NXP TV550.  This is the first TV platform manufactured in 45nm CMOS low-power process technology. Engineering samples scheduled for 1Q09.
The TV550 platform incorporates the PNX85500 processor and integrates NXP’s proprietary Motion Accurate Picture Processing (MAPP2) technology. This single SoC handles all the new [...]

Why is it critical to look at DRAM and NAND memories together?  As the target application for memory technologies continues to shift away from desktop personal computing, the value propositions of memory technologies have also changed.  In this report, we examine the strategic issues of the total memory market where manufacturing and technology decisions decide [...]

Several Semico analysts attended Semicon West this year.  Although the forecast for 2008 capital expenditures is for less spending, there was still a lot to get excited about at the show this year.�
We talked to a few companies with innovative improvements to image sensor technology.  Sarnoff has developed a back illumination technology that utilizes SOI [...]