ChipCrunch.com

In April we discussed Nethra’s acquisition of Amric’s assets and what the future might hold for the products Ambric was developing. Shortly afterwards I received a ping from Nethra’s Senior Director of Business Development, Manu Pallai, to check their website in about a week for some updates. I have to admit I sort of dropped the ball on that one, and only recently got a chance to follow up with what Manu was alluding to. As it turns out, without as much as a press release, Nethra has now made available a whole slew of Ambric based development boards: the Am2045 GT, the AM2045 GT2, the Am2045 IDB, and finally the Am2045 GT2-SDI.

As the names imply, all of these boards are powered by the Ambric’s massively parallel processor arrays. All of these boards feature a PCIe interface and can be plugged directly into a regular system for easy development. The difference between the GT and GT2 is that the latter offers two Am2045 processors. The Am2045 IDB is a little bit more versatile and can be configured with a choice of processor arrays: Am2045, Am2029, and Am2016. It contains four 32-bit GPIO ports and an FPGA for custom logic. It also features a Serial Flash, a USB interface, and an ATX connector to expand the configuration options. The GT2-SDI is a reference design which adds a whole bunch of digital connectors and stream operations. The programming environment for these boards is the aDesigner Tool Suite and integrates Ambric’s structured object programming model (SOPM). We discussed the Am2045 and SOPM in more detail back in 2007 in this post. Nethra does not provide any pricing info for these development boards on their website at this time, but if they are reasonably priced I might have to pick one up just to have something this massively parallel to play with and possibly pit against a general purpose CPU.

Back in March we covered TimeFlux technology from LightWaves. The article sparked quite a discussion with people referencing the Shannon-Hartley theorem, time-frequency duality, and so on while discussing the performance claims made by LightWaves. The discussion focused mainly on wired networking and the ability to provide proper bandwidth and latency for real-time data streaming. Assuming that all this data in some way or another arrives at a particular location, be it an enterprise LAN or a home network, a good way to distribute it to all the clients will still be needed. With UWB technology floundering as of later, it seems that an alternate wireless distribution method will be needed.

This is precisely the market Quantenna is targeting: reliable high-speed wireless coverage for high definition (HD) video and related multimedia content. Based out of Freemont, CA the company recently raised $14 million in Series C funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners, Grazia Equity Gmbh, Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners, and Venrock Associates. Founded back in 2006, Quantenna has raised a very respectable $42 million in venture funding to date. The Series C funding is mostly to be used for expanding sales and engineering activities. Currently, the company offers free flavors of their 802.11n Wi-Fi compliant chipsets: the QHS1000, the QHS600, and the QHS450. The numbers in the product names correspond to the maximum link speed that each chipset is able to support. The flagship product, the QHS1000, can operate in the 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum concurrently, while the latter two work exclusively in the 5 and 2.4 GHz spectrums, respectively. The two most touted features that these chipsets support are the 4x4 multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) technology and dynamic digital beamforming.

According to the company press release, the combination of these technologies results in a four time larger coverage area and twice the throughput of existing solutions. At the same time the product page states that these technologies provide a 50 percent performance improvement over other 802.11n solutions. I’m not a networking expert by a long shot, but if you claim twice the throughput and a four time larger coverage area, wouldn’t this indicate more than a 50 percent performance improvement? Of course, it can be that performance includes additional factors that are not accounted for in the initial statement, or maybe the baselines for the two comparisons are different, nevertheless some clarification would be appreciated. The 4x4 configuration refers to four radio transceivers and four antennas which in addition to supporting two data streams can utilize the extra two antennas for dynamic digital beamforming to increase data stream reliability by 12dB over 3x3 configurations. Optimum performance is achieved by continually monitoring real-time packet data and adjusting the wireless signals in milliseconds as needed. A short video describing beamforming can be viewed on the company’s website. Additionally, Quantenna has filed several patent applications including one for a tunable antenna system and one for interference rejection, in case you might enjoy further reading.

If the recent economic events are not gloomy enough for you, why not read about how the American semiconductor industry has been in a slow decline over the last thirty years? To be fair, Brian Bradshaw’s article is not all depressing with a portion devoted to the initial rise of the American semiconductor industry. The fall section however is significantly longer and more detailed, discussing such topics as Japan’s DRAM dominance in the mid 1980s to the limited success of the American Sematech initiative. An interesting observation made by Brian is that Sematech allowed the chip industry to reach a level of maturity at which point the price of capital and labor became the dominant factors in selecting sites for future manufacturing plant location. This, according to Brian, is the reason why of the last 40 chip factories, 35 were built in Asia, and only 5 in the United States (US) and Europe combined. He further examines the ascend of South Korea to DRAM and Flash memory dominance and the emergence of the chip foundry business. Finally, Brian spends a little bit of time musing about the future of the US industry and the major players.

Reading through the article one can’t fail to notice how Texas Instruments to some degree or another is quite connected with the current state of affairs. Whether through joint ventures with other companies, board members, or spin-offs, the company has its fingers in more places than one might imagine - quite fascinating. As far as the discussion on the future is concerned, it would have been nice if Brian had expanded his analysis of some of the major players. For example, many engineers question IBM’s commitment to the semiconductor industry? If they could find a buyer with deep enough pockets would they try to get rid of the division? How about Oracle’s recent acquisition of Sun? How much of Sun’s engineering will survive the acquisition? There have also been rumors of Sun being interested in developing x86 processors. Then there is Intel’s recent success with the Atom processor and the collaboration agreement with TSMC. And finally, increasing amounts of rumors are emerging regarding Apple’s ambitions for chip design as described in a recent Wall Street article. As a matter of fact, quickly browsing through the current Apple job opening yielded several chip design positions ranging from circuit design, to verification, and implementation, all of which seem to be located in the Santa Clara Valley - Maybe the outlook for chip design in the US is not so bleak after all.

Some people prefer to let bygones be bygones, and move forward. Maybe they are naturally motivated or perhaps they prefer to follow their own direction. On the other hand, others such as myself, enjoy taking an occasional trip down memory lane and pay homage to some of the great achievements accomplished by previous generations in the semiconductor world. Not only do their achievements serve as inspiration, but they also put into perspective where the industry has been and where it might be going. For people who enjoy history and have a particular affinity for semiconductors, there exists a great web-site appropriately titled "Silicon Genesis: An Oral History of Semiconductor Technology."

The project was inspired by Rob Walker, co-founder of LSI Logic Corp. (1981), who has been involved in the semiconductor industry since the early days through a variety of past engineering positions at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Over the last couple of decades he has been working as a consultant and currently owns his own firm, Walker Research Associates, which specializes in business development for emerging technology companies. He has also authored a book titled "Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and LSI Logic Corporation", which very much served as a prelude to this project. The project is currently being hosted at Stanford University and the video count is quickly approaching seventy.  The interviews feature some of the famous semiconductor and computing pioneers including Gordon Moore, John Hennessy, and many others. One great thing about the project is that the videos are completely un-edited from the originals and often time contain glimpses into more personal moments of these individuals, moments that these days would be cut from most documentaries in favor of commercials. A gem in the collection is the 180 minute long documentary titled "The Fairchild Chronicles." It combines excerpts from many of the available video clips to tell the 29 year story of Fairchild Semiconductor from when it was found in 1957 until it was sold to National Semiconductor in 1986. The availability of transcripts for each of the videos is another nice touch, in case one needs to search for a specific moment or obtain a particular quote.

Even with all of the nice features, the actual project site leaves a lot to be desired. The browsing of the videos is rather primitive; links are all placed on a single page in alphabetical order with short descriptions which often time tell one little about the actual content of the interview. This approach will surely become unmanageable as the number of videos increases. There also seems to be no key word search, so you are forced to dig through the individual transcripts. While the project information page does provide a link to search digitally streamed videos, at present that link seems to be broken. Another major gripe is the low video resolution which is unsuitable for full-screen viewing. Additionally, you may also need some good speakers, for the audio volume is quite low in some videos. It would be nice for the project to allow users to tag videos and to at least leave comments and opinions to make it a little bit more interactive - in other words to update the site features to accommodate the modern web surfer’s social and visual demands, as is nicely exemplified by the Computer History Museum and their YouTube integration.