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Many companies have promised to take on Intel in the x86 space, but not many have fared very well, either going under or being scooped up Intel’s arch rival AMD. Today, News.com posted an interesting article about a Santa Clara, California based startup named Montalvo Systems that is supposedly designing multi-core chips for the ultraportable and notebook spaces. Don’t bother checking their web site-unless you are looking for a job in California, Colorado, or India, for other than that it has absolutely no product or company information. The Register reported in 2006 that former Transmeta CEO Matt Perry assumed the CEO position at Montalvo during that year. However, the News.com article yields several new insights, such as the fact that Peter Song, who previously founded MemoryLogix, is Montalvo’s chief architect, and that Peter Glaskowsky is their chief system architect. The company has so far raised $73 million through several venture capital firms. The currently published patent applications do not reveal much about the processor as they are focused mainly on power conservation via a buffer/mini-cache that either reduces DRAM accesses or provides information when the processor is in a low-power state and thus not available. The two patent applications can be found here and here. I was hoping of finding one of the Montalvo guys at the ISSCC conference this week in hope of obtaining some additional information; however, with thousands of engineers running around this proved to be a futile attempt. As such, unless Montalvo makes a public announcement later this year or emerges from stealth mode, it will be hard to make any comparisons to Transmeta or to assess the company’s chances.

Need some reading material to get you through the next meeting that you have no interest in but are required to attend? Well, in that case you might want to take a look at Semiconductor International’s Top 100 List of features, blog entries, and webcasts on their website based on the number of views throughout 2007. The articles in the list cover a wide range of the semiconductor spectrum ranging from process development, to nanotechnology, and solar cells. The list actually contains only 99 articles from last year, since it seems that one article from '04 made it onto the list by accident; however, if you don’t manage find anything on the list that might be of interest to you, you are either extremely up to date and well read in the semiconductor field, or you have no interest in semiconductors in the first place, in which case you might want to consider a career change.

Having covered magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) on several occasions it is time to move on to something a little bit more exotic, namely nanotubes. The January issue of the Nature Nanotechnology Magazine contains a very interesting article titled: Nanoscale Memory Cell based on a Nanoelectromechanical Switched Capacitor. Unfortunately, unless you are a subscriber to the magazine or might have access to it through your company, you will not be able to access the full article. Thankfully, nanowerk.com has a pretty nice write-up on the article and even obtained permission to reprint several of the illustrations. Looking at these illustrations, it can be seen that the proposed device is a three terminal device consisting of a source, drain, and gate. The source and drain both contain vertical multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT). The nanotube on the source, which is grounded, is covered with a dielectric layer which in turn is covered with a metal layer, thus completing the capacitor. The drain terminal is connected to what in a conventional design would be a bit-line and the gate terminal is connected to what would be a word-line. The mechanical switching occurs when bias voltages are applied to the drain and gate terminals. That is, when a gate voltage is applied but no drain voltage is applied, nothing happens. However, when both drain and gate voltages are applied, such that the gate voltage is higher than the drain voltage, the nanotube on the drain is subject to a repulsive electrostatic force from the gate and bends towards the source. If it bends far enough it establishes contact with the metal layer of the source and charges the capacitor effectively storing a logical one in the bit-cell, hence the name nanoelectromechanical switched capacitor (NEM).

The authors of this paper have only implemented the writing portion so far, but according to the paper, reading from the bit-cell would follow a similar sequence with the exception that the nanotube on the drain would be unable to make contact with a bit-cell that contained a logical one since even though it would still experience an electrostatic force from the gate, it would also be subject to a counter force from the charged capacitor, and thus no current would flow from the capacitor to any current sensing circuitry. All of the above is just a brief summary, the article contains all the dimensions used for constructing the device, a detailed description of the manufacturing method, all the voltages and capacitance numbers, and of course a few equations for calculating the switching speeds and effective capacitances, and is therefore definitely worth a look if you have access to it. While all of this is very preliminary work, it is nevertheless very fascinating and only gives us a small glimpse of all the esoteric structures that circuit designers might get to play with in the coming years.

Shocking Technologies Inc. has to be one of the more unique names for a company in the semiconductor field. At first, one might assume justly that they might be working on a product to compete with the Taser, but in actuality quite the contrary is the case. Shocking Technologies is currently developing voltage switchable dielectric materials which are targeted at the printed circuit board (PCB) and semiconductor packaging markets to prevent electrostatic discharge events. As far as the name is concerned maybe it is supposed to imply that this new technology is going to prevent shocking to electronic components – but that might be a stretch.

Shocking Technologies is based out of San Jose California, and in April of last year raised $7M in first round funding from ARCH Venture Partners and ATA Ventures. More recently the company raised an additional $4M in venture debt from Hercules Technology Growth Capital in late December. Surprisingly, finding additional information about the company is rather difficult since their own web site only contains a brief introductory paragraph followed by contact information. Digging around the web one can find that the company’s CEO is Lex Kosowsky who has previously held positions at DMS Technologies, Leading Technologies, and National Semiconductor, but technical information is harder to come by. The only thing available is a single US Patent #6797145 that was issued to the company’s CEO in 2004. Like most patents it is a rather lengthy and not exactly easily readable document, but the general idea is this: Above a characteristic voltage the dielectric material switches from being a dielectric to a conductive material and thus creates an alternative path for the excessive current and hence protects other electronic components. There definitely is a market for this technology, so we’ll be keeping an eye on Shocking Technologies and Lex to see whether they can deliver what they claim in the patent.