ICs & Semiconductors

Cypress Semiconductor has announced that it has integrated Ramtron International’s ferroelectric random access memory (F-RAM) products into its portfolio, which will enable it to offer the market’s widest range of densities for fast-write nonvolatile memories. F-RAM, which is the industry’s lowest-power nonvolatile memory, complements Cypress’s nonvolatile static random access memories (nvSRAMs), which are currently the world’s fastest. This new combination will look to serve a broad range of applications that require data to be retained when power is lost.

Lattice Semiconductor will be demonstrating 3D Impact Media’s RealityBox, a low density LatticeECP3 FPGA-based real-time 3D video converter at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) January 8-11 in Las Vegas.

Cypress Semiconductor has introduced a fully-qualified PSoC 5LP programmable system-on-chip family. The new devices provide high-performance programmable analogue, the best ADCs, according to the company, available on an ARM Cortex-M3-based device, and the flexibility to design custom systems with 80+ pre-verified production-ready Components for the PSoC Creator’s IDE.

Ziptronix has signed a licensing agreement with Tezzaron Semiconductor for the use of patents regarding Ziptronix’s direct bonding technologies, ZiBond and DBI.

XMOS has significantly extended its family of xCORE multicore microcontrollers, with the launch of three new USB-equipped products that address the processing and interfacing needs of a broad range of embedded applications. The new products are the U10-128; U12-128; and the U16-128, which provide 10, 12 and 16 logical cores respectively and deliver up to 1000 MIPS of deterministic parallel compute, along with 128K Bytes of on-chip RAM.

The Intel Corporation has announced the introduction of the Intel Atom S1200 product family, delivering the first low-power, 64-bit server-class system-on-chip (SoC) for high-density microservers, as well as a new class of energy-efficient storage and networking systems. According to Intel the microprocessor features essential capabilities to achieve server-class reliability, manageability and cost effectiveness.

The semiconductor’s days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from a rival material, indium gallium arsenide. The compound transistor, built by a team in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, performs well despite being just 22 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in length. This makes it a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, says co-developer Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Researchers in Taiwan have found that a brief jolt of 800C heat can stop flash memory wearing out. While flash memory is used in computers and electronic gadgets because it is fast and remembers data written to it even when unpowered it can become increasingly unreliable after about 10,000 write and read cycles. Using heat, the researchers from the electronics company Macronic have found a way to "heal" flash memory materials to make them last 100 million cycles.

Amid increasingly weak economic conditions that are depressing both consumer and business spending on electronics, IHS is downgrading its forecast for the global semiconductor market in 2012, with revenue now expected to decline by 2.3 percent for the year. Worldwide chip sales are expected to decrease to $303 billion in 2012, down from $310 billion in 2011, according to preliminary results from IHS, the information and analytics company.

In what is being described as a breakthrough for high-definition (HD) network video surveillance, NXP Semiconductors has announced its Advanced ASC884xA and ASC885xA series of single-chip video processors for HD IP security cameras.