First things first: Why would you pick a name which sounds so similar to nVidia? I’ve had friends who’s startups had names that differed by more than a mere two letters from other brand names, but still got letters from brand lawyers from similarly names companies within days. Just strange, but I suppose investigating naming choices is beyond the scope of this blog.

Movidia is a fabless semiconductor startup based out of Dublin, Ireland, and has just secured $14 million in Series A funding led by Celtic House Venture Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company intends to enable users to be able to edit videos directly on their mobile devices. Especially, they are targeting the always on-the-go users, who contribute a lot of User Generated Content (UGC), but rarely have time to sit down and edit their content on a PC. There really is not much information available regarding the actual processors that the company intends to develop, other than the claim that they are supposed to be low-power. Since the company targets a lot of video processing, where a lot of parallelization can be exploited by working on different parts of the image simultaneously, one could expect either a multi-core processor or something along a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector processor.

There are a couple of issues that seem to bother me about the company’s strategy, although they are simply guesses without knowing what the company is actually developing. First, it is unlikely that mobile device developers will want to integrate an extra chip into their devices. They are having enough trouble with battery life on the current crop of smart-phones as it is. As such, it would seem the company would have to develop a chip that implements all the other basic cell-phone functionality as well. Which leads directly to the second problem - they would have to go up against the mobile processor giants such as Qualcomm, TI, and even possibly Intel depending on the final power envelope. All of these companies have mobile chips and sophisticated development tools to go along with them – which would make it difficult for Movidia to compete. Then again, Sean Mitchell has been around the semiconductor industry for a long time, and has lead Parthus Technologies through an IPO in 2000, so he just might have a few aces up his sleeve. Until Movidia reveals more about what exactly they are developing, enjoy the video below that the company created as an introduction.

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.