In the last few days, many articles have been written about Steve Job’s contributions.  They tend to focus on recent product introductions, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad.  Those are sensational products; but, in my opinion the authors’ memories are too short.  The articles do not give proper recognition to Steve Job’s first [...]

On May 10, 2011 ADI announced the availability of the semiconductor industry’s only double balanced wideband passive mixers.  P/N ADL5811 is a single-channel mixer and P/N ADL 5812 is a dual-channel mixer.
Due to differences in frequency allocations around the world, wireless receiver manufacturers often need to provide a receiver that will operate on several different [...]

In a May 2, 2011 presentation at the Semico Summit, Mr. Danny Biran, Senior VP of Marketing at Altera, discussed new opportunities as the boundaries between semiconductor logic device types become blurred.
According to Mr. Biran, the boundary between FPGAs, ASICS, ASSPS and CPUs (MPUs, MCUs and DSPs has until recently been extremely well defined.  FPGAs [...]

In an a May 2, 2011 presentation at the Semico Summit, Mr. Len Perham CEO, MoSys, Inc. discussed looming problems in the processing of Internet traffic and offered a solution.
According to Mr. Perham, Internet traffic will increase exponentially over the next three years, driven by applications such as video streaming, IPTV, P2P, cloud computing, social [...]

As cell phones improve, offering more features and higher data transmission rates, base station manufacturers must provide more with less.  More bandwidth, more channels, more quality of service with less power, less space and less cost.  On March 21, 2011 Texas Instruments Incorporated announced the availability of three new 16-bit DACs that will help base [...]

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a design engineer at a company making an industrial control device or a medical instrument.  You’ve got the digital portion of your design pretty well nailed, but there is a 4mA to 20mA process control loop and some isolation issues that you’re a little concerned about.  Although you [...]

I guess I’m a gearhead. I like double overhead camshafts, six speed transmissions and small-displacement, high revving engines that make lots of noise. I like fast cars with great handling. I’m having trouble adjusting to hybrids and even more trouble adjusting to plug-in electric cars that need to have electronically generated noise [...]

On January 18, 2011 CEITEC S.A., a semiconductor manufacturer in Porto Alegre, Brazil, announced the successful completion of a 12 month field trial of an RFID chip that can be implanted in cattle for positive identification. This application is important for Brazil. Beef is one of Brazil’s largest exports. The RFID chip [...]

According to Atheros Communications, IEEE’s P1901 powerline networking draft standard is on schedule to be ratified early this fall. Semico believes that this will spur a high growth phase for powerline networking.
A powerline network makes a lot of sense. It uses the electrical wiring in a home to connect PCs, home entertainment systems, TVs and [...]

Where is the next semiconductor marketing opportunity?  Maybe it’s not a specific application, geographic region or country but an overlooked portion of the world’s population.Â
In the developed world, we drive upscale cars, travel around the world and want to be connected 24/7.   We understand immediately the appeal of stability control, GPS navigation systems, powerful laptops, [...]