Hasta La Gadget!

Aicha Evans, VP, Mobile and Communications Group at Intel

Later this month, Intel is going to ship its XMM 7160 discrete LTE solution for mobile devices. With this new design, Intel will support 15 LTE bands (there are 30-40 bands, and growing), which is a good step in addressing the LTE band fragmentation that is currently causing difficulties in terms of network interoperability and worldwide compatibility for LTE devices. Unless carriers decide to use a common set of LTE bands, it will be very difficult, if not impossible (in the short term), to completely solve the LTE “fragmentation” problem, but handling 15 bands is a whole lot better than a handful, and it could allow device makers to improve coverage for a single device SKU (stock keeping unit, or “variant”). This is particularly difficult to do without increasing the board size, since additional frequencies normally requires more on-board components. (more…)

Intel XMM 7160 LTE Modem To Ship This Month original content from Ubergizmo.

As you may know, Samsung used to manufacture Apple’s Ax series of processors (or SoC) but given the strained relationship between the two companies, Apple has been reportedly shopping around to diversify its manufacturing capability. It’s not the first time that Intel has been mentioned as being such a potential partner, and given that it has excellent “fabs” (chip-building plants) it would make sense that Apple talks to them, although Intel is not really known to be a “contract manufacturer” (build chip for others), and usually companies like TSCM, and UMC take on these manufacturing jobs for companies like Qualcomm, Marvell, NVIDIA, etc… It’s typically a low-margin business that Intel is not really interested by. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Steve Jobs To Become Manga Star In Japanese Comic, iPad Used To Drive A Car In Russia,

Intense semiconductor competition has already forced numerous Japanese companies to work together, and now Fujitsu has announced that it’ll merge its LSI chip design and R&D divisions with Panasonic. The two companies are looking to the state-run Development Bank of Japan to fund the new venture, which comes in the wake of expected Fujitsu losses of over $1 billion this year — forcing the company to cut 5,000 jobs and transfer 4,500 to other divisions by March 31st. Fujitsu said it’s also looking to transfer a state-of-the-art LSI fabrication line in central Japan to a new foundry venture with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s largest chip maker. That carries on a trend in declining Japanese chip dominance, exemplified by Elpida’s bankruptcy and the recent government bailout of Renesas, which itself is a merger of NEC, Hitachi and Mitsubishi’s semiconductor operations.

[Image credits: Wikimedia commons]

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Via: WSJ

Source: Fujitsu

ARM’s big.LITTLE is a processor technology that you are going to hear a lot about in 2013 as Samsung, Huawei and others promote their 8-core (octo-core) chips used in smartphones, tablets and possibly Chromebooks. There is no doubt that marketing teams will call those chips “8 cores” – because you know, 8 is better than 4, which is better than 2… But these chips aren’t 8-core in the way that most people think about 8-cores, which means 8 cores that work together on a computing task. Instead, big.LITTLE octo-core chips have two sets of four cores, some big, some small (hence the big.LITTLE name), that take turns to execute a task with the most efficient power envelope. Let’s take a closer look:

big.LITTLE overview

big.LITTLE comes from a simple observation: in order to make each processor core faster, they need to get bigger to host more execution units, instruction decoder, cache memory etc… But as chips get bigger, they invariably have more transistors and require more power to maintain or switch state. (more…)

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As you should already know, graphene is the super thin, super strong, transparent, conductive, self-repairing material that’s poised to revolutionize the future by not only by super-charging batteries but also by giving us flexible semiconductors. This is how they get made. More »