All of the interesting gizmos get the attention of the mainstream media and even the industry press.  The various smart phones, IPTV, iPads and other devices that connect to the internet, especially via wireless, generate a great deal of excitement and sales.
However, these devices need an infrastructure to support them. As more devices come into [...]

Apple reported in its last financial results that as of June 26, 2010 it has shipped 3.27 million iPads.  This is the first quarter of availability for the iPad.  It is shipping at the rate of about 1 million units per month.  However, keep in mind that there was a large amount of pre-orders prior [...]

Frequent readers of the Semico Spin know that I am a fan of ComicCon and attend it in San Diego, CA during my family vacation. This is the seventh year in a row if I remember correctly which we attended. As I say every year, there were more geeks than you can shake [...]

June 28, 2010
Last week at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Orlando, FL, Freescale announced a new MCU product line, Kinetis, based on the ARM Cortex M4 core. Kinetis is scalable low-power and mixed signal design. Freescale is expected to introduce seven new Kinetis MCU families over the course of the next 12 [...]

June 21, 2010
There was a lot of excitement last week at the E3 Show in Los Angeles.  There were numerous announcements, demos and news on new game titles.  On the hardware side what grabbed a good deal of attention were Sony and Microsoft products for motion control to compete with Nintendo Wii.
The console makers were [...]

May 25, 2010
The world of TV is changing rapidly. The recent Semico Spin article by my colleague, Michell Prunty, presents the scenario that is playing out. The entire business model for TV is changing. Over a year ago cable TV companies were reporting that their cable subscriptions were dropping, but their internet [...]

The long awaited Moorestown platform has been released by Intel. This was presented at the Intel Developer’s Conference in September 2009. The Moorestown platform consists of the new Z6xx Atom CPU (formerly known as Lincroft), a controller hub (formerly known as Langwell), a mixed signal IC and wireless options.
The mixed signal IC (MSIC) [...]

Oh it has been a busy week of rumors and speculation in our industry.
First there was the report that Apple is looking at designing in AMD MPUs in future MacBook designs. This should come as no surprise since AMD MPUs are 80×86 and Apple’s PC product line is based on Intel MPUs. Apple [...]

The Apple iPad has hit the market, at least in the US. It has been shipping well, though not as high as some had predicted. Incidentally, Semico has a conservative and slow roll out scenario for the iPad with sales picking up at the end of 2010 and early 2011.
Apple delivered the first [...]

The Apple iPad will be shipping April 3, 2010. If you have already pre-ordered, you will get it at that time. If you still need to order the iPad, you will be waiting until after April 12. According to recent news items, the pre-order levels may have exceeded Apple’s initial expectations.
Apple experienced [...]