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As of late it seems we have been busy writing non-stop about semiconductor startups. This of course is a good thing since it shows that even during these gloomy economic times innovation and startups are alive and well. Occasionally through it is interesting to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see what technologies might be coming down the pipeline. In other words, rather than looking at what a particular startup is doing, look at some of the things that are currently happening in the research community. Lucky for us, MIT, in their latest issue of the Technology Review journal did some of the leg work in their special report titled “10 Emerging Technologies 2009.” The entire report is an interesting read, but from the electronics and computing point of view a few of the sections might be more interesting than others, including:

Racetrack Memory: Memory technology that uses U-shaped magnetic nanowires. Portions of the wires have different polarities which represent 1s and 0s. Spin current can be applied such that the magnetic pattern propagates along the wire, through a point at which it is read. According to the article, data can be written and read in a little less than a nanosecond, which is not quite SRAM speed, but very respectable nevertheless.

HashCache: A hash function algorithm that translates data into a shorter representation which at the same time is the address of the data on the hard disk, thus eliminating a lookup table that is usually needed to look up data associated with a hash key. The idea makes sense. What does not make sense is the comparison table for total cost of a comparable setup: 14 gigabytes of memory for a conventional setup can hardly account for a $2500 price difference, especially with today’s DRAM prices.

Liquid Battery: A battery that is completely composed of liquids. The electrodes consist of molten metals separated by a motel salt. The beauty of the design is that these liquid layers remain separated naturally because of the different densities of the materials. A very unique property of the battery is that when the battery charges or discharges, the electrolytes and electrodes change in volume. Commercialization of this technology is expected within the next five years.

At the beginning of this month eetimes.com updated their silicon 60 list of emerging startups to version 8. Sometimes this update is exciting; introducing us to many new startups we might not have been aware off. Other times, the updates are so minor , that finding any new companies that have joined the list is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. This time around, eetimes.com did not disappoint tough. The newly published list is full of new startups, which account for over forty percent of the list.  A majority of the new startups are based out of California accounting for 10 of the 25 new additions, however as the list shows, startups can be found all over the world. The new additions to the list are summarized below.

• BeSang Inc. (Beaverton, OR):  3D Integrated Circuits
• BLX IC Design Co. Ltd (Beijing, China): Godson Processor Development
• Boston Power Inc. (Westborough, MA): Rechargeable Lithium Ion Batteries
• BridgeLux Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA): LED Arrays
  
• Celeno Communications Inc. (Ra'anana, Israel): Wi-Fi Chip for HD Networking
• Elastix Corp. (Santa Clara, CA): EDA Tools for Power Consumption
• Element CXI Inc. (Milpitas, CA): Software Defined Hardware
• Field Emission Technologies Inc. (Tokyo, Japan): Nano-Spindt Display
• Fresco Microchip Inc. (Toronto, Canada): RF and Mixed Signal Design
• Gemini Design Technology Inc. (Fremont, CA): Fast Spice Simulator
• Genusion Ltd. (Amagasaki, Japan): eCFlash and B4-Flash Memory
• Gigle Semiconductor Ltd. (Barcelona, Spain): Multimedia Home Networking
• IPtronics A/S (Roskilde, Denmark): Optical Interconnect Silicon
• MimoOn GmbH (Duisberg, Germany): Software Defined Radio Solutions
• Newport Media Inc. (Lake Forest, CA): Digital Audio and Mobile TV
• Nextreme Thermal Solutions Inc. (Durham, NC): Thermal and Power Management
• Nujira Ltd. (Cambridge, England): Power Amplifiers Efficiency
• Percello Ltd. (Ra'anana, Israel): Digital Baseband Solutions
• Quantenna Communications Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA): High-Speed Wireless
• Signet Solar Ltd. (Menlo Park, CA): Affordable Renewable Energy
• SiliconBlue Technologies Corp. (Santa Clara, CA): Low Power FPGAs
• SiOnyx Inc. (Beverly, MA): Shallow Junction Photonics
• Tela Innovations Inc. (Campbell, CA): Lithography
  
• TeraNetics Inc. (Santa Clara, CA): Mixed-Signal IC Design

As of late we have seen a slew of startups that focus on finding digital implementations of what are typically considered analog problems. Examples include Blacksand Technologies and digital amplifiers, Bitwave Semiconductor and programmable transceivers, and WiSpry’s tunable radio frequency (RF) technology. The reasons for this are many: analog circuits are tricky to design, significantly affected by variation and noise, often time difficult to integrate together with other digital circuits especially on the same die, and most likely require special process rules. Last but not least, there a lot fewer analog designers these days than digital designers and finding a really good one can be a challenge in itself.  As such, with price-point and low power operation being the dominant factors in the market currently, digital implementations become more preferable.

With this in mind, Powervation, a fabless semiconductor startup based out of Limerick, Ireland, has chosen to specialize in digital power control. The company was founded in 2006 and is being backed by Scottish Equity Partners, Intel Capital, Venture Tech Alliance, 4th Level Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company is currently touting a technology that it calls Auto-Control, which is essentially a digital algorithm for DC/DC control circuits. It enables these circuits to sense different conditions such as load, capacitance, and inductance and optimizes the power-control function to compensate accordingly. The digital algorithm replaces the analog compensation loops that were traditionally required to stabilize voltage conversion and transient response. Powervation’s first product, dubbed the Plug-and-Power controller is aimed at power converter solutions in several different spaces. It is expected to become available later this quarter. While the company reveals little about the digital algorithm or its actual implementation, Peter Cark’s column over at EETimes Europe suggests that the initial results looks quite promising. Overall system efficiency gains of up to 30 percent can be expected with a 65 percent reduction in component count when compared with analog implementations.

We wrote about Movidia in October of last year, when they posted a little introductory video about themselves on their website. Since the company target the mobile space and multimedia editing on the go, we speculated that we should either expect a low-power multi-core architecture, or a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector processor. Even though the company has officially launched the MA1110 multimedia processor, given this press release, we are still not much wiser as to what the MA1110 actually looks likes. Other than touting features that the MA1110 supports, such as real-time image stabilization, super resolution zoom, slow motion, and color matching, the press release reveals absolutely nothing about the chip architecture. Richard Wilson, in his column over at ElectronicsWeekly.com, was able to obtain a few additional details: the chip is produced in 65nm, contains a 32-bit RISC core, and has a novel bus architecture that allows for a high level of data throughput. This however will have to do for now, at least until Movidia demonstrates the MA1110 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in mid February. Consumer samples of the chip are expected to become available later this Summer.