Electro-ramblings

With less than two weeks to go until the world's biggest electronics trade show, now might be a good time to pay a visit to the Electronica pages on Electronics Weekly.

We've posted some early releases from companies exhibiting at the show, along with useful information such as a floor plan of the halls.

During the week of the show, from November 14 to 17, we'll have reporters trawling the halls for the best stories and news items, which we'll post live to the website.

Also worth a visit is the official website of Electronica, where you can find out lots more useful info about the show, including an exhibitor database.

Costs, and not just performance, may be the driving factor behind the uptake of silicon-on-insulator, according to an interesting piece by Richard Wilson on Electronics Weekly, where he asks Is silicon-on-insulator technology mainstream?

SOI on a chip from IBM

Microprocessor developer ARM is quickly establishing itself as the core provider of libraries to the semiconductor industry, and has recently signed a deal with SoI wafer provider Soitec, and this week bought SoI firm Soisic which develops standard cell libraries, embedded SRAM memory compilers and I/Os.

The article points out that one of the really interesting things about SoI is that it can reduce manufacturing costs, rather than increase them as is the received wisdom:

According to a report by Semico Research, SoI as a substrate can reduce the cost of ownership of some silicon by up to 40 per cent.

This is leading several firms to adopt SoI:

... the number of firms adopting the technology is steadily growing. AMD and IBM have already made the switch for specific processors, while Freescale, Renesas and Atmel are also SoI adoptors.

As production capacity of raw wafers slowly increases, (Soitec is constructing a 300mm fab in Singapore) then expect more and more companies to start switching to SoI for cost reasons - not just performance.

IT website ZDNet has undergone a complete redesign, launching this morning with a radical makeover of its pages.

After launching a huge suite of blogs during the last two years - which led to huge increases in traffic - ZDNet has now gone the whole hog with Web 2.0.

The site include loads of social networking features and nice features like a tag cloud showing the most popular keywords being written about and accessed.

News on the home page has tabbed browsing, so you can look at the latest stories, but also filter by most discussed, most popular and those highlighted by the editors.

An interview with Matt Loney, the site director, on Liberate Media shows just how far the firm has moved away from the traditional publishing paradigms.

"We've put a lot of thought into search with our redesign, because in addition to encouraging user generated content, we want to give readers a way to discover each other based on the content they and their peers are creating as much as on who knows whom."

This is probably the first example of a publisher, originally from the print world, totally embracing Web 2.0. Let's hope it's not the last.

Certain things are sent to wide me up, and wireless access is one of them. The job of being a web manager means I need to use a laptop, some of the time on a wireless network.

At home this is OK. My £50 DLink router always connects first time, never drops out and I can work from any room in the house.

Why is it then, that at work with millions of pounds of IT systems, it always takes several minutes to find the network, which frequently drops out and is patchy around the building?

It seems the second two problems might have a cure from researchers at a couple of UK universities and one from New Zealand.

This blog from New Scientist suggests that using specific materials when building walls can help route wireless signals around a building. Hooray.

This week there's a long article on Electronics Weekly offering help and advice on improving staff performance, and hence productivity in business.

Written by Helen Cracknell from Business Link, Improving staff performance looks at the review process, training, motivation, leadership and personal development plans.

The article is the latest in a series from Business Link. Also on the site are Small business: Planning for growth, Using a business plan to grow your company, and Starting a business? Get yourself educated.

On the recruiting side of things we've got Business Advice: Getting new workers started and Recruiting 101: How to hire new staff.

It's becoming a really useful series of articles for anyone running a smaller firm, or anyone wanting to start their own firm.

More information can be found at Business Link.

A recent round table discussion brought together a group of LED lighting experts, with the talk centred around the possibility of high power LEDs replacing the general purpose market for bulbs.

..the use of higher power LEDs as general purpose lighting sources, which have the potential to replace filament bulbs and even fluorescent tubes, has now become one of the most interesting component markets in the industry

Organised by Electronics Weekly, the expert opinion came from firms such as Osram, Dialight Lumidrives, EBV Elektronik and PixelRange.

Opinion was mixed on how quickly LEDs would, for example, start to replace fluorescent tubes in general lighting applications.

“That is the Holy Grail for manufacturers, that white LEDs will enter the traditional consumer lighting markets,” Allan Morris from PixelRange.

“The Chinese took the cost out of compact fluorescent lights and they will do the same in the white LED lighting market. I won’t say the domestic market won’t happen, but for us it is a long way down the list,” Gordon Routledge, managing director of Dialight Lumidrives

Unfortunately for white LED makers, they still need to double the efficiency of their emitters to rival fluorescent tubes, which can reach 100 lumen/Watt.

Two or three years ago, the process technology race between Altera and Xilinx was neck and neck - it was difficult to split the two programmable logic firms.

But Xilinx execs will be feeling fairly pleased with themselves this week, as Altera admits it won't have 65 nanometre samples until Q3 2007.

That is staggering, when you consider that Xilinx started shipping 65nm samples, albeit in small doses, in May of this year.

When Xilinx launched samples of Virtex-5, the company said its lead on process technology was “Six, maybe nine months.”

So why has the process technology gap - which didn't exist a couple of years ago - grown to more than a year?

One reason for this gap is the different approaches of the two companies' foundries. Xilinx's foundry UMC worked on a standard process at 65nm - exactly what Xilinx needs. And even if UMC hadn't come up with the goods Xilinx is also fabbing the devices at second source Toshiba, and could have used its second source fab at IBM.

However, Altera's foundry TSMC has gone for a low power process for its first stab at 65nm - which is not strictly suited to FPGAs. Altera has had to wait for TSMC to get round to doing the necessary higher power process, as it doesn't have a second source.

There's a good article on the subject of 65nm at Embedded.com - 65nm: Where are the chips?

Update: Canadian reverse engineering firm Chipworks has just released a breakdown of the Virtex-5, comparing devices from Toshiba and UMC.

Do you want to work more than 48 hours a week?

The European Union wants to abolish long working hours for employees and end a fine tradition of abusing employees and milking them for all they're worth.

Which all sounds very laudable and is warmly received by various trade unions. But it seem that abolishing the opt-out that currently allows long hours would not be welcome by employees in the UK.

Research from Manpower suggests that only a quarter of UK workers want restrictions on the number of hours they work in a week.

Rather than being pressured to do longer hours, it seems that most employees want the opportunity to earn overtime beyond the 48 hour limit.

Out of over 2,000 firms polled in the study, 85% who use the opt-out say ending it would adversely affect their business.

Here's more information on the Working Time Directive from the Business Link, from the Department of Trade and Industry and here's a good outline from the BBC.

There's a great interview with Tony Blair over at New Scientist, a sister publication to Electronics Weekly, where the Prime Minister says science is vital to society.

New Scientist editor Jeremy Webb managed to get into number 10 to speak to the PM - no mean feat for a consumer science publication - and the result is the Tony Blair Interview.

Blair, who professes to know little about science, nevertheless seems to hold the discipline in high regard:

"For the future of the British economy, it [science] is as important as economic stability. If we do not take the opportunities that are there for us in science then we are not going to have a successful modern economy."

Blair reckons links between academia and industry are vital - and this is something the electronics industry in the UK is becoming much better at.

"You need a certain amount of pure research, and the excitement and creativity of scientific discovery. But if you also have universities and research centres sufficiently in tune to what is going on in the private sector, then hopefully discoveries will be made that have a real utility."

From the interviewer's position, Jeremy describes the PM as coming across as well-meaning and sincere:

"There’s no doubt that the Labour government have poured lots more money into publicly-funded research, and they've made funds available to modernise university labs. They’ve created a much more positive attitude within academia and given tax breaks to firms that conduct research. It helps when Blair says things like 'science is almost as important as economic stability'."

Maybe there's hope for science, engineering and technology yet!

We've been waiting all year, and the main event has finally arrived - Electronica!

Fantastic - a week of pork knuckle, saurkraut and German lager - brilliant. The electronics industry doesn't get much better than this.

David Manners and I will be blogging direct from the event (assuming the technology works - and if it doesn't there'll be several hundred people within shouting distance who I can directly blame for its failure).

I've got a packed programme of events, visiting the stands of companies such as Altium, Imperas, Kontron, QNX, Actel, Analog Devices, International Rectifier, Chipworks, IDT, Texas Instruments, Schurter, Maxwell, and Vicor.

Several other journalists from Electronics Weekly and the Reed Electronics Group will be reporting from the show, and you can catch the latest news on our Electronica mini-site.

So technology willing, and if my liver survives the TKO party tonight, come back tomorrow for live updates from the show.

The electronics industry is very much alive and kicking, if the atmosphere at Electronica is anything to go by.

Today I've been to see Altium, Kontron, QNX, Actel and Analog Devices. All reckon its a good show, and it's still the first day.

Attendees are here in Munich in good numbers, and they're all smiling. The lager helps.

XJTAG's booth is packed, which I'm sure is due to the technology, and not the three scantily clad girls giving out free-bees.

Hall A6 is a bit racy as well, with a German circuit board maker doing body painting of topless models. It's quite funny watching loads of guys wandering past, heads pointing in one direction eyes in another. Some of them for the third or fourth time. Of course, I was only hanging around for research purposes.

Electronica is packed - really packed. Getting to the halls on the U-Bahn was a nightmare, and people were still streaming in through the doors late in the morning.

Journalists on half hour interview slots are struggling to make their appointments becuase of the crowds and getting some lunch could be a non-starter.

There's a stready stream of visitors through the International Rectifier stand to see the Playstation 3 they've got. It's connected to a 1080i monitor and the quality of the graphics is stunning. Not that you'd know it from my pathetic attempt to take a photo.

Many thanks to the executive v-p from IR who allegedly cradled the machine on the plane all the way from Japan to get it to the show on time.

Playstation 3 is also part of the presentation from Chipworks, the reverse engineering people from Canada. They've just started a teardown of the machine, looking at the 65nm Cell processor, emotion engine and graphics chip inside. Expect more on this soon.

Last night at Electronica we had the Industry Awards event. It's the second time we've held the event in Munich, and it went down really well.

Comedian Dominic Holland was the presenter for the night, and he did a good job of taking the piss out of the whole industry. Apparently we're all a bunch of nerds. Quite right too.

My blogging colleague David Manners still hasn't seen the naked woman in Hall A6. The problem is, it doesn't matter who has seen her, not one single person can remember the name of the company.

One of the biggest talking points among journalists at electronica last week was the no-show at the CEO panel by Carlo Bozzoti, the boss of STMicroelectronics. For one of Europe's top three CEOs not to turn up at the annual panel of the industry's biggest trade event is a "big thing".

As my collegue David Manners pointed out: "What on Earth could be more important than the annual CEO panel."

In fact, the behaviour of all the top bods at Electronica has our friends over at EETimes seething. Brian Fuller's opinion column CEOs say 'see ya' to Electronica panel, lists a catalogue of bad form from the industry glitterati.

In particular, Fuller bemoans the "no questions" format of the CEO panel:

This CEO group is eloquent when it wants to be. If it was they who made a no-questions panel a condition of their participation, then we've entered a sad, dark world.

He's right. For a panel session not to be moderated by someone who can field questions from the audience, whether from engineers or from journalists, is pathetic. Whoever made the decision to ban questions should take a long hard look at the message they're sending out to the industry.

As Brian rather eloquently puts it:

There was a time when electronics was roaring and CEOs energetically engaged in public discourse about where things were headed and the numerous possibilities that awaited technology creators who shared ideas. Perhaps they've lost the vision, the courage of their convictions.

Ed Sperling at Electronic News has written an interesting blog comment suggesting the chip industry in the US is waking up to the fact that George Bush's policies have not done the country any favours on the world stage.

For six years, most of the electronics industry sat stoically and grumbled while one bad decision after another was thrown in its face. Research funding is now scarce. The tax research credit wasn’t renewed. H1-B visas are being doled out for all the wrong reasons in the wrong places. Stock options were slashed for most workers and others got clobbered for repricing.

I'm not sure whether the final point is worth complaining about as fraud is fraud, but you get the point.

During the years of the Bush administration, most other countries involved in high-tech have surged forward. The UK, Ireland, France and a host of Asian economies have benefited from technology, to a certain extent leaving the US behind.

However, since the mid-term electrions in the States, industry leaders have started to complain a bit more loudly:

The days of complaining behind closed doors are over. Oil and defense interests are no longer in total control. Now the question is whether this industry can rebuild fast enough to keep up with some very tough global competition, which has dug in deeply since the current administration first came to power.

As an industry exec pointed out to me last week, although perceived wisdom says that a Republican government in the US is best for business, in recent years it is the periods of Democrat control that saw the biggest gains for the tech industry. The next two years should be interesting.

Techie blogger Dick James has put some initial information about the Playstation 3 teardown on his Chipworks blog.

Chipworks were showing a PS3 with the top taken off at Electronica. Over the coming weeks they'll strip down the system, remove the chips and then look inside to see what they're made of.

So far Dick says the PS3 has four main devices, including the eight core Cell Broadband Engine from IBM/Sony/Toshiba and the RSX (reality synthesiser) graphics chip from Nvidia.

We also seem to have the EE+GS [emotion engine] chip that was used in the PS2. I have heard that NEC got the design win for their embedded DRAM to go with the graphics processor; so maybe that’s the fourth big chip we can see on the board.

Dick reckons the Cell processor and DRAM are fabbed on 90nm. The emotion engine chip presumably gives backwards compatibility for PS2 games.

Looking at the pieces as they come out, the most impressive bit to me is the thermal engineering. There’s a cooling fan the size of a dinner plate, and some hefty heat tubes, all to get the heat way from the core chips.

Meanwhile, iSuppli has revealed that Sony is losing up to $300 on every PS3 it sells. The analyst says the $499 20Gbyte version has a bill-of-materials and manufacturing cost of $805, while the 60Gbyte version costs $840, a loss of just $240 on the $599 retail price.

Last week's Elektra awards have been You Tube'd by an enterprising PR man working for TSMC, the Taiwanese foundry.

Andrew Shephard from UK PR firm EML took this video of TSMC's Dieter Stroehle going on stage to accept the award for Manufacturer of the Year.

The awards were held on board a yacht in Munich harbour and you can clearly see there was a force ten blowing that night. That or Andrew really needs a steadier hand.

More details of the award winners can be found on the Electronics Weekly main site.

The world might be going high tech, but try telling that to Indian student Sainul Abideen, who has apparently demonstrated how to encode 256Gbyte of data on an A4 sheet of paper.

The article at TechWorld says that Abideen prints multi-coloured geometric patterns onto the paper, which can be read back by a suitable scanner.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch.

Abideen, who has just finished his Masters degree in Kerala at the MES College of Engineering, Kuttipuram, has named the process “Rainbow Technology”. He imagines using small pieces of card to store data which can be read by a scanner included in a laptop or desktop PC.

It's like data cards and punched paper tape all over again.

An interview at Green Supply Line with Chris Smith, head of the UK RoHS enforcement at the National Weights and Measures Laboratory, says most products they have tested are not RoHS compliant.

Even though companies are trying to meet the standards, they will overlook mechanical items or plastics that might contain brmoine for example.

Smith sounds like he's trying to accommodate firms wherever possible:

If you have a product not quite compliant and are working towards it, we will open dialog with you. Be honest with us. If you're honest with us, we have avenues to explore to work in a more cooperative manner.

He does, however, have a warning for firm's trying to avoid RoHS compliance:

If you evade or try to mislead us, and we're aware of the problem, doors will be closed.

You have been warned, as they say.