Last week, Intel entered into an agreement with AMD and also agreed to pay $1.25 billion to the former for dropping its antitrust lawsuits. According to the latest report from IDC, PC processor unit shipments in 3Q09 rose 23% q-o-q, and Intel increased its share by 2.2% to 81.1% while AMD had a share of 18.7%, a loss of 2%. Let’s take a closer look at the recent performances of AMD and its rival, Nvidia.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

Internet connected Digital TVs are making their first big splash in the TV market and DTC is forecasting a rapidly growing market in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific markets.

How these TVs will be used by consumers isn’t entirely clear but they are marketed as a way to pull in Internet video content independent of any gated TV services. The result is a competitive threat to gated TV service providers. What is also unclear is how consumer would manage an ever-increasing growing and fragmented line up of programs.

Read the rest of this blog at: http://www.dtcreports.com/blog2.aspx

There were several options for HP to combat Cisco in the networking arena, including Brocade and Polycom. It looks as though they have chosen to go after Cisco front and center by acquiring 3Com. The latter has done a marvelous turnaround in the past three years. The stock has moved steadily up, and now HP is paying a 40% premium to make 3Com central to its networking strategy ($7.9 a share).

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

The two leading chipmakers, Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) have recently reported their results. While Qualcomm is enjoying a more stable legal environment after ending its disputes with Nokia and Broadcom and extending its patent deal with Samsung, Broadcom is getting involved in a legal tug-of-war with Emulex. Let’s take a closer look.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

Disney took the wraps off its Keychest initiative for online digital distribution last week, as the company seeks to temper the effects of the growing slump in DVD sales (down as much as 25% at some studios). While this particular initiative seems unlikely to achieve that outcome, the shift in thinking from device based content security to device independent content security is pretty radical from such a major media player, and bodes well for the future of digital distribution.

To read the rest of this entry, please check out the Weekly Riff at:
http://www.dtcreports.com/blog2.aspx

The Linley Group has recently learned that Marvell has begun shipping production quantities of its Kirkwood Duo processors, the 88F6321, '6322, and '6323. As the name suggests, these are dual-core versions of the company's Kirkwood processors. They fill a narrow gap between the single-core versions and the company's Discovery Innovation line. We estimate that they sell in 10K quantities for $18-$35.

To read the rest of this blog entry, please visit Linley Chips In.

The Image Sensors 2009 conference wrapped up in San Diego recently.
Attendance was very low -- no surprise in these tough economic times. Despite that, there were several good presentations that offered insight into new directions at some companies worth watching -- like Texas Instruments.

http://semicondr.com/Blog/Entries/2009/10/9_RE-cycle.html

I may be the engineer in the family, but my wife is the inventor.

Being an engineer is easy. You go to school to learn well established laws and methods. When you get a job, there are others who can mentor you and show you the ropes. If you need to know more, there are training classes to take. Someone else, usually marketing, decides what needs to be to be designed. All you have to do is follow the rules.

Being an inventor is hard. There is no school for inventing, nobody to teach you the ropes, and no classes to tell you how to do things. You come up with your own idea that has never been done before. You learn on the fly what you need to know from a variety of domains you know nothing about. You build it yourself. There is no such thing as first pass success. Experimentation and refinement are a constant process.

To read the rest of this entry, please visit Harry's blog here:
http://theASICguy.com

Guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala recently finished his in-depth analysis of STMicroelectronics' JV, ST-Ericsson. Today's Tech Stocks post reviews STM’s (NYSE:STM) recent results in the context of Nalini’s assessment and also takes a look at the results of another major semiconductor player, Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN). Sequential growth for some divisions at both companies may indicate that a semiconductor recovery is underway.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

Continuing its transformation from a low-cost vendor to a high-performance supplier, Samsung has rolled out a pair of new application processors, each containing a 1GHz Cortex-A8 CPU. The S5PC110 targets smartphones, whereas the S5PV210 is designed for netbooks. The chips follow the 65nm S5PC100, a custom version of which powers the iPhone 3GS. The new 45nm processors are due to sample in December.

To read the rest of this entry, please visit Linley Chips In.
http://www.linleygroup.com

According to a preliminary estimate from iSuppli, global PC shipments grew 9.8% sequentially in the third quarter. This week, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), the world’s largest chip maker with annual revenue of $37.6 billion, reported strong third quarter results driven by the rebound in the PC market. Let’s take a closer look.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

The recession had a severe impact on the semiconductor industry in 2008, but the programmable logic device (PLD) market was one of the few segments which saw growth. This $3.8 billion market received a boost early this year following the expansion of 3G mobile networks in China. The overall programmable logic market is estimated to grow to $4.2 billion in 2013. Let’s take a closer look at the dominant players, Xilinx Inc (NASDAQ:XLNX) and Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:ALTR), which together account for about 86% of the market.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

I was contacted a few weeks ago by Synopsys’ PR agency to see if I’d be interested in covering an upcoming product announcement. I usually ignore these "opportunities" since the information provided is usually carefully wordsmithed marketing gobbledygook and not enough for me to really form an opinion. However, it turned out that this announcement was on a subject I know a little bit about, so I took them up on their offer.

To read the rest of this entry, please visit Harry's blog here:
http://theASICguy.com

We’ve come a long way. I remember waiting for my parents to set up the Betamax camcorder on Christmas morning. We had to wait for hours as batteries recharged and lights were set up. And in the 80s no one could even imagine uploading their video onto a computer to share with the world.

Today’s camcorders are small, quick, easy to use and high-def. And the video software is so simple a child can use it. Leading the charge for camcorders and desktop software are products that use the AVC/H.264 video compression standard. AVC offers greater efficiency than many other compression technologies and can deliver the high-def pictures consumers desire.

But can AVC/H.264 save any portion of the camcorder industry?

Read the rest of this blog at: http://www.dtcreports.com/blog2.aspx

We get our first look inside the production version of Intel's 32nm
process thanks to Dick James and his colleagues at Chipworks who
posted some images of the very first teardown of a device from the
Westmere product family - specifically the Clarkdale desktop CPU.

After some brief comments on Intel 32nm, there is a preview of the
Image Sensors 2009 Conference set for next week in San Diego.

http://semicondr.com/Blog/Entries/2009/10/9_RE-cycle.html

On September 29, Micron Technology, Inc. (NYSE: MU), the leading memory chipmaker, reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009 results. Although the company booked its fourteenth straight quarterly loss, there was one bright spot in that losses were less than last year and beat estimates. Micron’s shares have more than quadrupled since the beginning of the year. Are these signs that with the memory market is also recovering? Let’s take a closer look.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

Smartphones are responsible for giving consumers one of their video fixes these days. They’re not just for early adaptors or businesses anymore, but are now being toted around by teenagers, poor twenty-somethings and every other segment of the population. And now that smartphone shipments are seeing some growth, what new innovations will they bring to the table?

Read the rest of this blog at: http://www.dtcreports.com/blog2.aspx

In the previous post, we looked at Infineon’s strengths in wireless. However, Infineon’s portfolio is still incomplete in the area of connectivity solutions, which are playing a major role in the convergence trend.

Infineon remains a minor player in Bluetooth. Infineon lacks much of the IP related to connectivity solutions. Infineon’s Bluetooth and GPS solutions use third-party software stacks. As a result, Infineon does not offer any combo chips for connectivity. There are none promised in the future, either. Most other major vendors offer combo solutions that provide space and power consumption savings.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

Research In Motion Limited (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM; TSX:RIM), the maker of the popular BlackBerry with annual revenue of $11.07 billion, reported its second quarter results last week. Its third quarter outlook was disappointing as Apple and Palm have upped the ante by lowering prices on their phones.

RIM launched two new BlackBerry smartphones during the quarter, the BlackBerry Tour at $200 with Verizon and Sprint for CDMA networks and the BlackBerry Curve 8520 with T-Mobile for GSM networks. The low-end BlackBerry Curve 8520, available for $49, features a touch- sensitive track pad and dedicated media keys. The BlackBerry Tour supports high-speed 3G EVDO REV A networks and features a 3.2 MP camera, GPS, an advanced media player. However, it was allegedly having problems with its trackball that initially caused high return rates and is not as much a hit as the company’s earlier launches, Storm and Bold.

Read the full blog entry at http://www.sramanamitra.com.

At last week's Linley Tech Processor Conference, IBM announced the successor to its PowerPC 440/464 CPUs, the PowerPC 476FP. Able to issue up to five instructions at a time and process instructions out of order, the 476FP will likely achieve industry-leading single-thread throughput for a CPU core. Having a nine-stage pipeline and implemented as a hard core, the 476FP is conservatively rated at 1.6GHz in IBM's 45nm SOI process. In this configuration, the core measures 3.6mm2 and consumes 1.6W. Customers can begin designing ASICs using the CPU in October. IBM expects the first 476FP-based products to qualify for production in 2010. A synthesizable version will also be available.

To read the rest of this blog entry, please visit Linley Chips In.