Industry Squibs

We wrote about XMOS Semiconductor about a year ago when the company first emerged from stealth mode and introduced its programmable semiconductor technology called Software-Defined Silicon (SDS). Essentially, the idea was to configure the underlying hardware to handle the software tasks at hand via a high-level description language. Obviously, there are many ways of solving parallel programming problems for multicore processor, however, according to Professor David May who is the CTO of XMOS, many approaches to date will simply not work, as he recently revealed in a column by David Manners over at ElectronicsWeekly.com.

Professor May is mostly critical of Intel and Microsoft, arguing that the basic definition of their problem is flawed in that they are trying to take current sequential applications and enable them to run better on multicore processors – which is "virtually impossible." He further points out that the shared memory approach is flawed as well since every time more cores are added, they will end up competing to gain access to the same resource, essentially making an already complex problem even more difficult. He is also not a big fan of people who put their faith into compilers or abstraction layers for legacy software, arguing that the former take too long to develop and optimize while the latter are simply inefficient. One of the more interesting quotes from the article is with regards to computer engineer in general and a paradigm shift that David thinks is necessary: "A universal computer is an infinite array of finite processors, not a finite array of infinite processors." - Now you have something to contemplate over you next coffee.

At times it is easy to get wrapped up in following the latest technology trends, startups, funding and anything else related to emerging technologies in the semiconductor industry. Sure these things are interesting and often can be precursors as to where the industry might be heading, but just as important and interesting is it at times to delve into the details of bygone days, to dig up some interesting problems, solutions, and occasion some very entertaining history.

If assembly language is one of your favorite past-times, then you are likely to get a kick out of pagetable.com, a blog maintained by Michael Steil and Sebastian Biallas, related to assembly language, tricks, trivia and puzzles, and on some very interesting articles. Case in point is the latest entry about Bill Gates’ potential Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC.  This entry is not a simplye rumor, but rather a very well researched and detailed examination of Microsoft BASIC’s history on many different platforms, including Altair, 6502, Apple, Atari, and Commodore. Michael even throws in some assembly code that show how the Easter Egg was implemented. The article is a pleasure to read, full of history and nostalgia, and brings me back to my Atari and Commodore days - which are very much the reason why I ended up in the semiconductor industry in the first place. There are several other very interesting articles as well as puzzles that can be quite challenging if assembly is not your forte or if you are rusty like me.  Anyhow, if you have some spare time, abut don’t feel like wasting it mingling with your co-workers in the company 's break room, give this blog a look and indulge in some computer archeology.

A couple of bulletins have been published last week concerning the semiconductor industry, and unlike the recent startup and venture capital news, these are actually on the positive side. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported that chip sales for the first have of this year are up a healthy 5.4 percent over the same period last year. The SIA attributes the sales growth mostly to strong sales of portable computers and mobile phones, both of which experienced double-digit unit growth. With emerging markets having significant growth in both of these areas, it is not surprising that the Asian-Pacific region had the highest year-over-year growth at close to thirteen percent, with Europe coming in second at around five percent, and finally the Americas and Japan coming in at close to 3 percent.

While the SIA findings are inspiring, any growth is good growth, the IC Insight findings for the same period are even more interesting. There has been quite a bit of movement in the Top 20 list of the semiconductor sales leaders: The biggest position gainers were Qualcomm, NEC, Panasonic, and Broadcom. The biggest looser hands-down was Qimonda. With a 47 percent sales decline year-over-year for the first half of the year, Qimonda dropped a staggering 12 positions and consequently out of the top 20. The list becomes even more interesting when sorted by growth rate. Of the top six spots, three are occupied by fabless companies, and the top spot is occupied by a foundry where a lot of the fabless guys build their chips, namely TSMC. All of the companies ranked in the top six had impressive growth rates of over 20%. It should be noted that several of these companies are exposed to the fast growing mobile market; however, this by itself is not nearly enough, as TI who is usually also a strong player in this market did not experience any growth over the same period - very surprising. There has also been a lot of talk regarding AMD and the asset-light strategy that the company intends to pursue. Freescale has adopted a similar strategy over the last few years, however the company’s 3 percent growth rate shows that going asset-light by itself is not enough, or at least that it might take some time for the results to show. One thing is for sure thought, with the fabless companies doing so well, and with even more companies considering going fabless or asset-light, the foundries must be licking their chops.