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Semiconductor News Stream

3.Intel Quietly Demonstrates Smartphone Featuring Atom System-on-Chip/ xbitlabs.com

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1. PC Makers Scramble in Wake of Intel Chip Flaw Revelation

Some PC makers are halting sales of PCs with Sandy Bridge processors as they try to work out issues related to Intel's faulty chipset, companies said on Wednesday.

Dell and Hewlett-Packard have removed from certain online stores desktops and laptops that paired Intel's latest Core i5 and i7 processors with a defective chipset that included a design flaw. Dell and HP are also providing remedies such as refunds or motherboard replacements to customers who have already purchased systems.

Intel earlier this week said a design flaw prompted a halt in shipments of its 6-series chipset code-named Cougar Point, which was used with new Core processors announced in early January. Intel said the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets could degrade over time, which could impact performance or functionality of storage devices such as hard drives.

The chip maker said that flaw could delay launches of laptops by a few weeks, as the chipset is closely paired with the new Core processors.

HP has stopped manufacturing products with the affected Intel technology and is holding shipments on ordered products, said Marlene Somsak, an HP spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

"Customers can return their affected product and choose a comparable product or receive a refund," Somsak wrote.

The issue is primarily limited to some HP consumer laptops and desktops, Somsak wrote. One commercial desktop PC that HP markets to small business customers in the Europe-Middle East-Africa region is also affected.

HP has also cancelled an event scheduled in New York City on Feb. 15 where it was planning to provide briefings on future business laptops. The briefings have been postponed, Somsak said. The event was being held as Intel plans to launch new Sandy Bridge processors for business laptops later this month.

Dell has pulled sales of four PCs, including the XPS 8300 desktop, the Vostro 460 desktop, the Alienware M17x R3 gaming laptop and the Alienware Aurora R gaming desktop.

"We expect to have more information next week on when these products will become available again," said David Frink, a Dell spokesman, in an e-mail.

Customers who have already bought Dell products will be supported under the existing warranty and service terms. "Once we have new chipsets from Intel in early April, we will provide a motherboard replacement that corrects the design issue at no cost to our customers," Frink said.

Specialist PC maker Falcon Northwest has delayed the launch of laptops with Sandy Bridge processors as its suppliers have halted chipset shipments, said Kelt Reeves, CEO of Falcon Northwest.

Falcon Northwest's desktops have also been affected. Falcon Northwest uses desktop motherboards from Asustek Computer, which has put a hold on supplying motherboards based on the Sandy Bridge chipset in the wake of Intel's announcement, Reeves said.

The chipset problem has a bigger impact on laptops than desktops, Reeves said. Adding SATA controllers to laptops as a workaround would be difficult because of limited space, while desktops have space to accommodate new controllers from third parties in lieu of the faulty controllers, he said.

Reeves said he never came across chipset issues in lab tests. But Falcon Northwest is making customers aware of the issue and continues to build Sandy Bridge desktops using the workaround while motherboard supplies last.

Lenovo said that the chipset issue affects models including its latest IdeaPad laptops and IdeaCentre desktop PCs.

"We have shipped a limited number of units with the affected Intel chip worldwide," said Kristy Fair, a Lenovo spokeswoman. She said the company would offer an update as soon as possible.

Intel has posted instructions on its blog for how to identify the defective part. The company has fixed the design issue and will start shipping a new chipset by the end of February.

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2. Intel discovers chip flaw in midst of major launch

The company said on Monday it stopped shipments of the chip used in personal computers with its most advanced Sandy Bridge line of processors and has already started production of a new version.

For Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, the design flaw is another distraction at a time when it faces sluggish personal computer sales and a major challenge from the exploding popularity of mobile devices, a market dominated by Britain's ARM Holdings.

"Does it change the perception of Intel's quality? Yes, probably. You've got real product out there that's been qualified and tested and green-lighted, and then you come back to say there's a problem and you have to recall," said Wedbush analyst Patrick Wang.

Intel has a good history of semiconductor manufacturing but it was criticized in the 1990s after it corrected but did not disclose a flaw in one of its Pentium processors.

Intel cut its first-quarter revenue forecast by $300 million and expects the total cost to repair and replace the chip to be about $700 million. Full-year revenues are seen unaffected.

The Santa Clara, California, company said the defect was discovered after it shipped more than 100,000 of the chips to computer manufacturers getting ready to sell new PC models with the Sandy Bridge processor, which Intel touts as its biggest-ever leap in processing power.

Had the problem gone undiscovered, about 5 percent of PCs using the new chipsets could have failed over a three-year period, Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC Client Operations at Intel, said on a conference call.

"It would be a low and continuing failure rate over the life of the systems," he said.

Advanced Micro Devices' shares jumped 4.4 percent to $7.82 as investors bet Intel's setback would give its smaller rival an edge.

AMD this year is launching its own new lineup of processors, code-named Fusion, which will compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge chips for PC design wins.

PCs using the chips started shipping on January 9, and Intel said a "relatively small" number of them are likely to have been bought so far by consumers. It had sent a bit fewer than 8 million of the faulty chips to manufacturers.

While Intel's processors are the brains in 80 percent of the world's PCs, the company has yet to make its mark in mobile gadgets that are increasingly used to surf the Web, manage email and perform other tasks once exclusively the province of PCs.

Some worries about Intel were eased earlier this month when it reported better-than expected revenue and margins for the fourth quarter and gave a rosy outlook for early 2011.

Despite lukewarm growth in PC sales last year, the Semiconductor Industry Association said on Monday worldwide chip sales for 2010 rose 32 percent to a record $298.3 billion. But it warned that this year it expected only "moderate single-digit growth" for the industry as a whole, as the faltering economy continues to suppress growth in demand.

Intel does not expect the problem with its so-called Cougar Point chipsets, which let the central processor interact with the memory, hard disk drives and other parts of the computer, to hurt its full-year revenue. It will deliver an updated version of the chip in late February.

But since the flaw affected some of the chips shipped in the fourth quarter, Intel plans to take a charge that will reduce gross margin by roughly 4 percentage points for that period.

It will also take a first-quarter charge that will cut gross margin by 2 percentage points.

Intel said its engineers zeroed in on the newest defect last week after manufacturers stress-tested the chips with high voltage and temperatures. The flaw could have stopped computers from being able to communicate with their hard disk drives or DVD drives.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC maker, and Dell, ranked No. 2, declined to comment.

"It's obviously a negative and a surprise. We think they can recover from this very quickly. This product was just being introduced and there's not many in the field," said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.

He said investors should buy shares of Intel if the stock appears under pressure from the Cougar Point problem.

The chip flaw, along with its recently completed acquisition of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG's wireless unit and the purchase of security software firm McAfee, expected to close in this quarter, prompted Intel to revise its overall outlook.

Helped by the deals, it expects first-quarter revenue of $11.7 billion, give or take $400 million, compared with its previous expectation of $11.5 billion, give or take $400 million.

"As a long-term investor in the stock I won't be changing my perspective on the shares, but in the short term this is a surprise," said Ralph Shive, manager of the $1.7 billion Wasatch-1ST Source Income Equity Fund. The fund owns shares of Intel.

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3. Intel Quietly Demonstrates Smartphone Featuring Atom System-on-Chip

Intel Corp. at its sales conference last week reportedly demonstrated a prototype of a smartphone featuring one of its Atom-based system-on-chip (SoC). The demonstration likely involved an early prototype of a handset running code-named Medfield SoC, which is due to be released later this year.

Unfortunately, the company also did not reveal the model of the device or the name of the manufacturer, hence, it is hard to say whether the prototype was built by Intel itself for software development purposes or is actually a pre-release version of an actual product. There are rumours that the forthcoming Nokia N9 will be based on an Atom SoC and will be among the first handsets to use Medfield as well as MeeGo operating system.

The only thing that is known about the device for sure is that it is highly likely to be based on Medfield SoC. Chief executive of Intel said late in 2010 that the first smartphones featuring Intel Atom-powered SoC would be released in 2011 - 2012, which is after Medfield becomes available.

"We have already produced our second-generation smartphone chip, which is called Medfield. It is presently in customer sampling. It is [designed for] phones to be shipped later in 2011 and 2012. You will see smartphones from premier market vendors with Intel silicon inside in the second half of next year," said Paul Otellini, chief executive officer of Intel.

Back last year a high-ranking executive for Intel said that Medfield, which will be made using 32nm process technology, will be able to challenge ARM-based SoCs in terms of power efficiency.

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4. Inside Samsung's 30-nm-class, 'green' DDR3 SDRAM

Jason Abt and Alexandre Dorofeev, UBM TechInsights 2/1/2011 8:44 PM EST

When Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced it would be the first to market with "30-nm-class" DDR3, the analysts at UBM TechInsights anxiously awaited a closer look at what was inside.Claiming to be the industry's first 30-nm-class SDRAM device, the Samsung K4B2G0846D has encouraged a healthy debate within our walls now that we have it on hand.

Primarily, most of the discussions have been on why and how the South Korean manufacturer can refer to their latest SDRAM offering with the term "30-nm-class."

There are, of course, a number of different ways of measuring 'node' for SDRAM, so it's important to look at the big picture, and not focus too much on a specific measurement.

With that in mind, how does Samsung's newest stack up? To better understand the breadth of Samsung's newest SDRAM, here is a quick comparison of their DDR3 device to the recently analyzed DDR3 SDRAM devices from the other manufacturers at the previous process node:

Table 1: Comparison of DDR3 devices from different companies at different nodes

From the table, there are interesting findings that come to light when you take a look at the differences between the half-pitch metrics for each offering, and how that compares to the unit cell area. It is very interesting to note that where Samsung's Shallow Trench Isolation (STI) half-pitch is substantially smaller than its wordline half-pitch, the reverse is true for Micron Technology Inc.

Ultimately, manufacturers are looking for a reduction in cell area—and Samsung has now established a clear lead. So how did they do it? Looking at the above table, you can see that most of Samsung's shrink is in one dimension. Squeezing the STI by that much was quite the engineering feat.

To temper our enthusiasm, however, it must be noted though that it is a shrink in one dimension and the cell architecture has not changed; therefore it is still considered 6F². This modified version of 6F² architecture, however, still presents a reduction in cell area size of 38 percent on Samsung's 48-nm DRAM and a reduction in cell area size of 24 percent in comparison to Micron's 42-nm memory device.

Beyond the 'node'

Though our wordline half-pitch measurement indicates a process node of 46-nm, if we were to look at the half-pitch of the STI (a much tighter arrangement in this DRAM structure compared to previous generations), we could conceivably call this a 30-nm device. However, under traditional 6F² architecture, if F was to equal 30-nm, the cell size should be 0.0054 um² (the calculation comes from 2Fx 3F= (0.030um * 2) x (0.030 * 3)=0.0054um²), smaller than the cell size we have measured of 0.0085 um².

For our measurement to match this area, the 'F' would indicate a process node between 37- and 38-nm. And therein lays the debate on how to classify this Samsung offering and why Samsung probably chose the naming convention of 30-nm-class. Regardless of how we want to define the 'node', we can all agree that this is a milestone in DRAM process technology for Samsung.

Cross-sectional image of Samsung 30-nm-class DRAM.

From a technology perspective, we're of course interested in far more than just cell size. Samsung has a history of introducing process changes well in advance of them being necessary. Kind of a test run to work out the inevitable kinks without the complications of trying to do everything at once. Has Samsung once again looked into the crystal ball, and worked to make the next generation that much easier to produce?

As the DRAM industry responds to this latest innovation, we'll be able to answer that question with more confidence.

We've also seen from Samsung's literature that there is a substantial improvement in low power characteristics. That may point to other process changes with this new generation beyond just the shrink. Some of these changes may prove to be just as interesting as the shrink itself, given the consumer implications in such a cut-throat market segment driven by cost and razor thin margins.

With this new device, the world's largest memory manufacturer aims to offer significant power savings to their customers while simultaneously lowering their own internal production costs. It remains to be seen, however, if this process shrink will translate to those goals.

Jason Abt is a senior product manager from the Technical Intelligence division of UBM TechInsights with over 14 years of experience in finding new approaches to analyzing the latest in semiconductor technology.

Dr. A. Dorofeevis a senior process analyst with 12 years of experience in analysis of silicon ICs and compound semiconductor devices for UBM TechInsights. He is very experienced in advanced process technologies and structures of flash memories, DRAMs, ASICs, processors and other devices.

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5. Powerchip Becomes DRAM Foundry for Elpida
	January 31st, 2011, 13:06 GMT\| By Sorin Nita


Elpida and PowerChip have just announced that the two companies have reached a non-binding understanding, enabling the former to purchase all PC DRAM products manufactured by Powerchip and sell them under its own brand. The agreement covers both existing and future memory chips produced by Powerchip, and is probably motivated by the ever dropping prices of computer memory chips. Currently, Elpida has a foundry agreement with Powerchip for PC DRAMs as the company purchases half of what Powerchip manufactures at their fabs in Hsinchu, Taiwan. This means that only half of the 80,000 wafers per month that Powerchip produces are released under their own brand name, the Taiwanese company also purchasing approximately 30,000 DRAM wafers from the Rexchip Electronics Corporation, to sell them under their own name. “Both companies are pleased with this win-win situation which will improve each company's business. “This will also allow both companies to focus on their core competencies; Elpida's sales and marketing and technology development strengths and Powerchip's manufacturing efficiency and process technology strengths. “Both Elpida and Powerchip will further cooperate together to improve customer satisfaction,” reads the press released issued by the companies. This agreement will enable Elpida to expand its production capacity without capital expenditures as Powerchip's fabs already use their technology for manufacturing memory chips. In addition, the agreement allows Elpida to allocate its Hiroshima Fab production capacity to the manufacturing of mobile DRAM parts, as demand for such chips has been increasing rapidly. Elpida can compensate a declining portion of PC DRAM production at Hiroshima by using its foundry partner to maintain and improve its presence in the DRAM industry. Powerchip plans to shift towards a foundry model by expanding its foundry production portion to Elpida as well as other semiconductor products and customers (without neglecting its current partners).

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Tablets be DRAMmed – 9 times as much

Research house IHS iSuppli says tablet computers will need nine times more DRAM this year than last.

Tablet computers are forecast to need 353.3 million gigabits of DRAM this year, on the back of 57.6 million tablets shipped. This DRAM demand is 834.7 per cent more than the 37.8 million gigabits 17.1 million tablets needed in 2010. The rise will continue, with 1 billion gigabits needed in 2012, 2.2 billion in 2013, and 3.5 billion in 2014; the predicted demand curve is accelerating.

IHS iSuppli tablet DRAM demand prediction

IHS analyst Mike Howard thinks this year's CES in Las Vegas was a turning point, with vendors such as Motorola, RIM, Samsung, and Dell piling into the market opened up by Apple's iPad.

Boosted DRAM demand could be fabulous news for DRAM fab operators, who have endured declining DRAM prices recently, unless tablet makers choose cheaper commodity DRAM. A second worry is that tablet sales could cannibalise netback and notebook/desktop PC sales so much that overall DRAM demand would fall. DRAM fab operators' glasses are always half empty.

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RMG and Associates

Insightful, timely, and accurate

Semiconductor Technology Consulting

Semiconductor News Stream

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1. PC Makers Scramble in Wake of Intel Chip Flaw Revelation

2. Intel discovers chip flaw in midst of major launch

3. Intel Quietly Demonstrates Smartphone Featuring Atom System-on-Chip

4. Inside Samsung's 30-nm-class, 'green' DDR3 SDRAM

5. Powerchip Becomes DRAM Foundry for Elpida

Tablets be DRAMmed – 9 times as much