IF YOU WANT to inspect a chip, there are various ways to do it, from cheap to expensive, easy to hard. If you want to peer inside the guts of a chip package, your options are more limited, but Scanning Acoustic Microscopy is one good way to do it.
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WORD HAS REACHED us that there is an Nvidia prototype crotchtop that the company is shopping around called Firefly. The ODMs say that it will be out in the September time frame, but since Tegra is a year late already, don’t hold your breath.
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WORD HAS REACHED our tender ears that Larrabee, the upcoming Intel GPU, will not be quite as generalist as they claim. The fixed function parts will be two HD decoders.
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THE NEW INTEL M-Series SSDs are already on sale a day or three early. The new versions, code named ‘Postville’ may look the same on the outside, but are much faster than their predecessors.
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IF YOU WANT to control devices that require precise, coordinated movements, protocols like TCP/IP have too much overhead and latency making life difficult or impossible. Luckily, a standard called EtherCat is aimed at fixing all the things that makes TCP/IP unsuitable while still running over low cost 802.3 Ethernet hardware.
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LETS SAY YOU have a modern far sub-micron fab, and you need to move a truck sized tool from one side of the clean room to the other. Standard construction equipment doesn’t work, it is too dirty, so Carpenter Crane Hoist made a line of hoists that are very clean.
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WOULDN’T IT BE nice if you could stamp out semiconductors like a printing press? Molecular Imprints is making a technology called imprint lithography that lets you do just that, stamp out chips.
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THE LONG DELAYED Intel Calpella platform is starting to make the occasional public showing, and like the famous hedgehog, if it sees it’s shadow, we get 6 more weeks of summer. We managed to snap a picture of one, you should be seeing lots more later this year.
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ON JUNE 23, 2006, AMD announced that they would be building a fab in upstate New York. Three years later at Semicon, Global Foundries made the official announcement that their Fab 2 will have a groundbreaking on July 24, 2009.
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SEMI’s mid-year Capital Equipment Forecast, released in San Francisco today, projects 2009 semiconductor equipment sales to reach a mere $14.14 billion in 2009.
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INTEL DROPPED A bombshell on the market today with a little bullet point and a few carefully chosen words. Opening up Atom to third parties to interface with willy-nilly went from impossible to product in the space of one slide.
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SEAGATE IS NOT ready to throw in the towel on high performance magnetic drives yet, and to show they are serious, Seagate just launched a line of 600GB SAS-6 drives. Take that SSDs, your puny SATA interface is no match for SAS-6 or Fiber Channel.
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AMD JUST DOUBLED the count on their 6-core “Istanbul” Opteron CPUs, going from 5 to 10 SKUs. The new parts are in the SE and HE line, on the top and bottom of the speed and power curves respectively.
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BEING A VICTIM of identity theft is no fun, but it is still possible to change your account numbers, it is a whole lot more difficult to change your eye color or height! Because of this, protecting biometric data is a particularly serious issue. Biometrics (physical measurements, voice or image and more) are used by many entities to improve authentication of the identity of passport and other ID holders.
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GOOGLE IS FINALLY launching an operating system called Chrome OS. The big loser in all of this is Microsoft, but there are two others that will also take a huge hit, Intel and AMD.
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Although Intel has announced new high-end parts that are slated to launch later this year the i9-7900X is still Intel’s fastest desktop CPU to date.
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In this article we’ll look at the air cooled version of AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64.
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Today we’ll be looking at AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU.
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In this review we’ll be looking at AMD’s other Ryzen Threadripper chip the 1920X.
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