Showing posts from January, 2009
Archive: January 2009
Semiconductor Business
This is the most common question being asked among engineers and rather should be asking if you are not. EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson Explores "We see giant companies like IBM and Microsoft announce great fourth-quarter and annual results, and then follow up with a layoff announcement." We see smaller companies in the fabless world staying on track on product development, successfully sampling to key customers, and ramping revenue …
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 29, 2009
Semiconductor Industry
With big players joining the fray in job cuts, the semiconductor job outlook looks atrociously grim. The recent figures and estimates suggest that this recession is one that was not witnessed before and here to stay. The list below gives the more recent jobcuts and updates. Samsung, Toshiba to cut more costs ST to cut 4,500 jobs amid weak results Corning profit falls; cuts up to 4,900 jobs TI to cut jobs 12% as profit sinks 86% IBM cutting about…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 28, 2009
Books and Resources
Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is a popular how-to book on Wikipedia that has all the information you need to get started with editing pages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be the biggest group writing project ever, but the one thing you won't find in the comprehensive online encyclopedia is easy-to-follow guidance on how to contribute. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual helps you avoid beginners' blunders and gets you sounding like a pro from y…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 28, 2009
Career Advice
You can Download a free copy of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" audio book by going to audible.com . To avail this offer, make sure that you select "USA" as the country when creating a free audible account on the next page. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide while the audio version was the first non-fiction audio book in U.S. publishing history to sell more…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 28, 2009
India Semiconductors
An event of VLSI Society of India ! Seminar on: Automated Design of Digital Microfluidic Lab-on-Chip (Connecting Biochemistry to Information Technology and Electronic Design Automation) Speaker: Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Dept of ECE, Duke University Date and Venue: 11 February, 2009, 11:00AM-12:00PM, G1, TI India Campus, Bangalore For Details click here!
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The Editor's Desk
January 28, 2009
Signal Processing
Subscribe to our RSS Feed to download your copy of the E-Book. E-Book: The Digital Signal Processing Handbook. Read further to find out how! To download this and future E-Book's, please look at the bottom of the post in your RSS reader. See example below!
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The Editor's Desk
January 25, 2009
Semiconductor Industry
It is no easy task to record the achievements of individual engineers nowadays. But looking at the past achievements and trends, most of them have had graduated from schools like MIT, Stanford, IITs etc. and joined a handful of companies that offered superb training grounds and career opportunities. Checkout this article on EETimes
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The Editor's Desk
January 22, 2009
Power Electronics
EETimes has published an article on the Top 10 Power Management articles of 2008. {Follow Here}
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The Editor's Desk
January 22, 2009
Semiconductor Business
Many companies are catching on to the fact that bloggers can provide an effective way to create buzz (viral marketing) about their brands. We've seen several efforts that explicitly recognize that fact, such as TasteCasting for restaurants and YokmoK's free travel giveaways. We want to bring this notion to our blog world. Please contact us directly if you are interested. We are sure, this will be more cost effective than just buying a…
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The Editor's Desk
January 18, 2009
Semiconductor Industry
Based on Revenue numbers from iSuppli in $Bn. 1. Intel - 34 2. Samsung - 18 3. TI - 12 4. Toshiba - 11 5. ST - 10.7 6. Renesas - 8 7. Sony - 7 8. Qualcomm - 6.7 9. Hynix - 6.4 10. Infineon - 6.3
Semiconductor Business
Anybody in this industry would agree that there are 3 things that are critical for its success. 1. Quick adaptation of Technology - Can impact chip cost, time to market and customer/market reputation! Even transfer of new technology from Engineering to production. 2. Being ahead of the competition - Bad marketing decisions and late changes in the design can adversely affect this motive. Smart decisions can avoid a critical delay. Definition of r…
VHDL
Verilog started out as a proprietary simulator in 1984 and enjoyed considerable success due to its C like syntax. In 1990, Cadence Design Systems made the language public. It became an IEEE standard in 1995. VHDL was developed under contract to the U.S. Department of Defense. It became an IEEE standard in 1987. VHDL has its roots in Ada. For many years there was intense competition between Verilog and VHDL for mind share and market share. Both l…
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Aarthi Chinappa
January 17, 2009
Tutorials
I am sure you have been reading this blog and did you decide to comment? In writing your comment, you may find a need to post a reference link which may be a website or an article on the internet or just a link to your blog or website or article. Just how easy is to do that? Well, it is simple. This is the code that you need to drop into the comment box: Replace the URL with the URL of the site or article you are linking to and replace the Ti…
Tutorials
As memories grow larger, with more memory cells packed into an ever-shrinking die area, the cost to manufacture a die remains fairly constant, while the time it takes to apply test programs increases exponentially. It is estimated that the cost to test a memory chip runs from 50% to 70% of the total cost of the finished product. The first steps in reducing the cost of memory test is to understand what fault mechanisms are most likely to occur an…
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The Editor's Desk
January 13, 2009
Tutorials
Memory test algorithms are fixed sequences of writes and reads that expose defects in RAM cells, address decoders and sense circuits. Legacy patterns such as GALPAT and Walking 1s find many faults but take time proportional to N 2 , so production memory built-in self-test (MBIST) relies on linear-time March algorithms such as MATS+, March C- and March B. This part of the series explains the classical patterns, how to read March notation, which f…
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The Editor's Desk
January 12, 2009
Semiconductor Industry
Hello Readers: Today we are happy to announce the launch of our new open invitation based column called "I have something to explain". A kind of "open Mic". Here the readers of this blog are invited with a chance to write an article of their choice that is unique, original that is not already on this blog. What you get back? Sorry we cannot pay you monetarily but in return you will get full credit for the post, an author page…
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The Editor's Desk
January 12, 2009
Tutorials
Semiconductor memories are characterized according to the following properties: Serial or random access, Volatile or nonvolatile, Static or dynamic, Destructive or nondestructive readout. Serial access memories are those in which data are accessed in a fixed, predetermined sequence. Magnetic tape units are an example of serial access. To read a record it is necessary to read the entire tape up to the point where the desired data exists. By way o…
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The Editor's Desk
January 10, 2009
Tutorials
Memories are pervasive in digital computing. Consider, the personal computer which has a main memory, video memory, translation ROMs, shadow ROMs, scratchpad memory, hard disk, floppy disk, CDROM, and various other kinds of storage distributed throughout. In addition, the die that contains the microprocessor also contains one or more levels of cache. A typical PC is depicted in the block diagram below. It is basically a memory hierarchy connecte…
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The Editor's Desk
January 10, 2009
EDA Tools
[Via ednmag] Fister, others out at Cadence Will new ideas dim the future of FPGAs? Structured ASICs and microcontrollers renew the debate Lithium-ion-battery-charging IC powered by charge-transfer, control innovations DDR3 SDRAM exposed: Inside a bleeding-edge, blazing-fast memory device Where is EDA going now? Critical clock-domain-crossing bugs CMOS winner-take-all circuits: A tutorial Cadence: The picture gets darker HDL-design challenges and…
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The Editor's Desk
January 09, 2009
Semiconductor Industry
Blogger's blogging platform is great but is not powerful enough to support discussions of any kind. We had evaluated Intense Debate's web platform but observed that it lacked the handle to tweak and collect data. Keeping these factors in mind we have decided to re-open our old Google group from the attic! So how to we plan to use this group you may ask? Its simple. We will post all questions only to this GOOGLE GROUP. This includes inte…
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The Editor's Desk
January 09, 2009
News
Hello Reader, In this New year we are happy to announce a significantly redesigned blog which gives more flexibility and control to all. Fortunately most of the features are available only when subscribed, either by RSS or by E-MAIL . Top 10 features: Summary of the articles on the main page! Expandable to full article when clicked on the Post Title or Link. Related posts links below the main article to access all the related articles and publi…
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The Editor's Desk
January 07, 2009
