the semiconDr blog

EETimes ACE

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:22:15 -0400

It’s been too long away from the blog, but a lot of other stuff has been happening. As mentioned here previously, my blogging time has been focused on the EE Life section of the EE Times site. I would like to update Dew Point more regularly, but that will come. First there was getting named partner at IP Research Group, then a new baby.
Blog or not, editorial has been going well in the last 12 months. Paul Boldt and I recently posted an update to Apple’s semiconductor strategy with an article. EE Times editors saw fit to make it the cover story on their May 2 print edition.
Apple A5: What’s on the Back 40? was released with interesting timing. The following evening, May 3, EE Times editors presented their Contributor of the Year award for an article about Apple’s A4. The first edition of this award was given to Paul Boldt, Tim Whibley and yours truly. It seems our A4 article was the most read article of 2010 on the EE Times web site.
EE Life editor Brian Fuller posted a video of both the Contributor of the Year and my new friend, Frank Eory, receiving his well-deserved ACE for Most Engaged EE Times Community Member. Brian took my comments about my family’s origins in North Dakota because he has the American family branch spelling of “Scanson” in his lower thirds on the video. I don’t hold it against you Brian. You were gearing up for a cross-country drive in the Chevy Volt. It’s worth reading Brian’s comments on the page with the video because it explains a bit about the value of the EE Times community and gives a sense of the type of people involved at either end of the Internet connection.
Bragging generally goes against my Nordic upbringing, but I needed to post this note about the ACE Award for a couple of reasons. The first is apparent in the picture from the ceremony. I received a warm welcome and generous congratulations from Paul Miller, CEO of UBM Electronics.
Secondly, but most importantly, I need to publicly thank EE Times Editor-in-chief Junko Yoshida for the selection. Not only that, but Junko has been a staunch supporter since the very beginning of my technology editorial work (back to the now defunct SemiSerious). I would have acknowledged Junko and the rest of the EE Times crew had they given me the chance for an acceptance speech. But the ACE Awards organizers wisely avoided any gushy, embarrassing (not to mention long and boring) moments.
Thanks Junko.

A Post About Nothing

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:24:46 -0500

Let me give you my excuse for taking time away from paying the mortgage today. I have several reasons for this post. First off, there was a great response with several readers taking the time to comment on my first post three weeks ago on the EE Times Blog page. I know Seinfeld created a wildly successful sitcom on the premise, but I am surprised by the fact that an article about nothing attracted many kind user comments while the first two “real” articles did not attract so much as a quick flame or two. The difference was that I posted here to announce Dew Point. This post is partially an experiment to see if readers of the semiconDr blog look here first and follow the link to EE Times. If that was true for the introductory post, please hit this link and comment on the future of the fabless model:
Real men have fabs…or do they?
UPDATE: Actually, I just checked and someone has finally pointed out that I disproved my own thesis by comparing fabless semicos to auto makers. I knew I left that paragraph in there for a reason!
The second reason for another post to link to Dew Point was to use a picture from my old friend, Glenn Sundeen, known as TigerPal in flickr. For the earlier post, I grabbed an image from a photographer unknown to me. Since then, Glenn was gracious enough to post several excellent Dew Point theme images. Check out the other images on TigerPal’s photostream. Back in the old days, I think I was the one that showed Glenn how to load film into his camera. But the digital revolution has been kind to him, and this is obvious in his photography. From his home base in Korea, he travels Asia and the world sharing much of his work online. For other expats of the Canadian Prairie, there are some recent posts showing the beauty of the those places we both left behind.
The final reason for this post is that I was just listening to a panel discussion from the EE Times System-on-chip 2.0 Virtual Conference. Dylan McGrath, online editor at EE Times, hosted an interesting panel discussion -- IP and IP Selection that fit well with my Dew Point article this week. I think it was the Cadence presenter, Steve Leibson, who suggested a future maturing of the circuit IP business that would look like the iTunes store. With an ‘i’ in front, Cadence may need to check Apple’s trademarks before they launch the IP Store. Actually, as Apple delves deeper into chip development, this may have been their plan all along.
New iStores aside, Leibson mentioned something more directly applied to my article about the fabless chip business. He compared current SoC development to the board-level design of the early eighties. Today’s engineers buy IP and place it rather than ICs to populate a board. That’s interesting because I think it will be the same people one day buying IP – OEM system designers – and making their own chips. That doesn’t leave much room for fabless semiconductor manufacturers.

A Long Absence

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:41:12 -0400

First off I sincerely hope that anyone checking this blog site regularly or who has been interested enough to subscribe to the RSS will accept my humble apology for the long dry spell.
The good news is that I will now be blogging more regularly. The reason is that I have made a commitment to EE Times to do so. My submissions will be exclusive to their site. The new blog is called Dew Point. Please check it out. So far, there is only one introductory post to explain the concept. It will keep very much to the spirit of semiconDr. Fortunately for readers, owing something to an editor who can pick up the phone to harass me or send a nasty email whenever she likes will be motivation enough to keep the cursor moving to the right.
The semiconDr blog is not dead, though. I will be splitting off some of my output to this repository occasionally.
Thanks for reading.
Don

Matrix 3D Memory Finds Its Niche

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:27:45 -0400

Last week, one of my favorite tech pundits, John C. Dvorak, tipped me off to the "new" SanDisk SD WORM card on his Tech 5 podcast. Immediately, I wondered if this was related to SanDisk's acquisition a few years ago of Matrix Semiconductor. Back then, my take on Matrix was that it would make a great archival digital film.
Around that time in 2006, I posted about Matrix 3D memory and its subsequent acquisition by SanDisk on the corporate blog I created for Semiconductor Insights. There was an announcement that SanDisk was re-engineering the Matrix technology to be re-writable.
It's bizarre to think that it would be possible to convert essentially a blown fuse (more precisely, anti-fuse, but still that is the essence of how any type of one-time programmable or OTP memory works) into a re-writable memory. But that’s what SanDisk CFO, Judy Bruner, seemed to imply in her EE Times quote:
"We would have 3-bits per cell, 4-bits per cell and three-dimensional memory which we acquired through our acquisition earlier this year of Matrix Semiconductor and which we are busy at work looking at how we evolve that 3D technology from a one-time-programmable to a read-writable type of memory."
Either there was serious confusion about the core Matrix Semiconductor technology, or SanDisk was using the acquisition buzz to promote one of their own developments that was connected in some way to the stackable or three dimensional concept in Matrix OTP. Perhaps there was even a patent related to 3D memory that SanDisk needed from the Matrix IP pool, but I am confident that the any new 3D re-writable memory would not be using the original Matrix storage element.
I thought it would be prudent to check with SanDisk about the lineage of the new WORM cards. This is what was returned:
"The new SanDisk SD WORM cards use proprietary SanDisk memory technology that allows us to achieve this archival length."
That doesn’t help my thesis one way or the other, but I’m sticking to it.
If you want more insight into the OTP anti-fuse memory, you can look at US patent application 10027466. Even a quick skim of this application should be enough to convince you of just how robust this type of memory is after writing to it.
It now appears that SanDisk has given up on the alchemy of converting OTP memory into a re-writable form with last week's announcement of the SD WORM card. I'm glad to see that SanDisk has finally decided to take advantage of one of the true merits of the Matrix 3D memory technology.
The engineers at Matrix Semiconductor created a stackable cross-point fusible memory that could be manufactured on mature or even trailing edge fab lines and still produce very dense packing of bits. The extreme regularity of the bit cell meant that the memory pitch could be much better than the standard pitches allowed in the design rules of the technology. On top of that (literally) the memory cells could be stacked layer upon layer for many times higher cell packing per square millimeter of silicon. The cost per bit was very low.
I had the chance to interview the Matrix CTO in the days before the acquisition. I was sold on both the talent and the technology they had developed. So it was not too surprising when they became an acquisition target for SanDisk.
Unfortunately, it seemed to become yet another case of a mature company where the decision makers are unable to see beyond the technology or lines of business that have been historically successful. SanDisk announced that the Matrix 3D memory was being transformed into a traditional re-writable form, and it appeared they were mired inside some deep wheel ruts cut by the NAND flash business. Or maybe they were just swallowing up a possible competitor.
Both re-writable flash and OTP memory are non-volatile. What distinguishes the OTP is just how non-volatile it is. That's what makes it attractive as a data archive. It is in no way unflattering to police departments to say that many professional as well as amateur photographers take the safety of their digital image files just as much if not more seriously than the justice system. That's why I think police archives are just a way of rolling out the technology.
It's great marketing to convince us that our own precious memories will be around for our grandchildren to enjoy if kept on the SanDisk SD WORM card. None of the usual enemies of data storage media like charge leakage or exposure to radiation or magnetic fields can change the memory state of the memory developed by Matrix Semiconductor. Alas, fire and flood are still the enemies of your family photo collection, but even a modest attempt to protect the digital film would keep those photos safer longer than old fashioned silver-halide film or paper prints.
But it didn’t take Japan’s national police force to convince me. Based on the Matrix 3D memory's potential for mass producing cheap digital film, the convenience factor was enough for me. Think about it. Take the pictures then upload them to your PC or wherever you like. Fill your SD WORM card and put it on the shelf. Now you have your pictures where you intend to view and use them, and they are already backed up on a dependable storage system. Back-up is built in automatically.
But then again, maybe I'm just another dinosaur that remembers buying analog film where we measured it by exposures or even by the foot. At one time, that concept was deeply enough ingrained that even the flash manufacturers (and most notably SanDisk themselves) believed they might market "digital film" as a consumable the same way that Kodak brought photography to the mass market.
Hopefully, SanDisk hasn't waited so long that the average consumer has realized the importance of data back-up and taken to other forms like cloud computing.

Apple iPhone Camera Improved

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:48:44 -0400

Tomorrow morning, lots of lucky folks will get their hands on the latest must-have hardware from Apple - iPhone 4. Many of those will want to check out the new camera hardware first since the latest incarnation of the iPhone includes a five megapixel (for stills) camera module that can shoot HD video as well. What they will immediately notice, however, is not the increase in megapixels from three to five, but the much improved responsiveness when snapping a picture.
I noticed this myself today but not because I got the new phone before anyone else. I actually noticed this improved camera app performance after I downloaded and installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS. The new iPhone OS has been available since Monday, but I finally got around to it today. Usually I grab free stuff a bit faster,
I was just killing time waiting for my five and nine year old daughters to finish rehearsing, so I could shoot a video of their trampoline dance routine. The camera app on the new iOS 4 was so much faster than the previous version that I had to take quite a few pictures of my dog lazing on the deck before the girls were ready for video.
It was a big install package that wrested complete control of my iTunes while those nearly 400 MB were dumped onto the phone. Coincidentally, I had episode 200 of MacBreak Weekly playing where one of that podcast's regulars, Andy Ihnatko, pointed out that 80% of "the awesomeness of the iPhone 4 is available just in iOS 4." That was certainly evident with the camera app.
Having the MacBreak podcast take over my computer made it awfully difficult to read patents, but it did give me time to ponder the importance of software on Apple's various platforms. That's something I spent quite a bit of time thinking about while writing about the A4 apps processor for EE Times. The latest iPhone is built from some great hardware, not least of all the A4, but a great deal of the absolute performance of Apple computers, not just the general user experience or the slick eye candy of the screen layouts and icons, can be attributed to the software from the folks down in Cupertino.
iPhone 4 won’t be a lazy dog.