| Editor's Note |
| HP's plan to shell out $1.2 billion to acquire Palm is in many ways a bold gambit. Clearly the company is betting that the smartphone market has legs. What is less clear is whether Palm, which last year held about 5 percent of smarthphone market in the U.S. and less than 2 percent of the market globally, is really the right ticket to the game. Editor at large Rick Merritt opines that Palm's operating system, unlike its many competitors, lacks a unique position in the market, and that any success HP might reap from this move is well down the road.
|
| Top Story |
Opinion: Palm won't give HP helping hand anytime soon
Hewlett-Packard's $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm could result in a winning combination but it will require one key ingredient—time, and lots of it.
|
| |
| Semiconductor News |
Boosted by Asian licensee, MIPS elbows ARM
MIPS has landed a major cellular baseband/application chip company based in Asia. The deal represents MIPS' first win on the cell phone market, displacing ARM as the processor IP core.
|
| |
Intel gains MPU share in slow Q1
Intel Corp. gained share in the microprocessor market in the slightly depressed first quarter of 2010, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).
|
| |
Ikanos' CEO resigns amid losses
Amid a string of losses, Ikanos Communications Inc. said that effective immediately Michael Gulett has resigned as CEO and president and as a member of its board.
|
| |
|
|
| |
| Business News |
Xilinx again posts record quarterly sales
Programmable logic vendor Xilinx posted a net income of $148.5 million on record revenue of $529 million for the quarter ended April 3, beating consensus analyst expectations. It was the second consecutive quarter in which Xilinx recorded record quarterly sales.
|
| |
HP to buy Palm for $1.2B
Hewlett Packard Co. said it will pay $1.2 billion for Palm Inc. in a move that will likely improve its position in the smartphone market while ending the saga of one of the pioneers in the segment.
|
| |
X-Fab's sales jump in Q1
The X-Fab Silicon Foundries Group posted sales of $79.1 million for the first quarter of 2010, up approximately 93 percent from a year ago and up abouty 19 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2009.
|
| |
| From ESC |
Motor control gets attention, award at ESC
There is a lot of vendor interest related to motors and motion control at this year's Embedded Systems Conference. Equally impressive, motor vendor PCBMotor won in the "Editors' Choice" category at the ACE Awards event.
|
| |
ESC: Embedded helping to harness medical data explosion
The proliferation of portable medical devices and the explosion of new patient data wrought by widely available imaging technologies are forcing medical electronics designers to devise new ways of integrating diverse biotechnologies with electronics while curtailing power consumption.
|
| |
ESC : Prism IQ compression technology lowers costs
Samplify's new Prism IQ compression technology lowers costs for mobile operators migrating to 4G. The algorithm reduces fiber optic costs when connecting 4G remote radio units in wireless base stations.
|
| |
ESC: Plurality launches scalable 256 multicore processor
Plurality has launched the world's first scalable 256 multicore processor for wireless infrastructure, creating a new category of acceleration co-processors, dubbed HyperCore, that simplifies code compilation, delivers performance that scales linearly with the number of cores, and offers power consumption that rivals hard-wired ASICs.
|
| |
| Design News |
Cadence beats estimates, sees broad strength
Cadence Design Systems reported first quarter results that beat consensus analyst expectations and its own guidance.
|
| |
Firm launches IP directory for FPGAs
Privately held Parallel Engines announced the availability of a directory indexing more than 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices.
|
| |
Gesture Designer lends hand for MEMs-based interface development
The Gesture Designer helps OEMs design gesture-based interfaces using Kionix's MEMS accelerometers, widening the potential range of motion-enabled functionality for consumer electronics. Kionix is pitching the software engine to developers of intuitive user interfaces and interactive games.
|
| |
| Course: From FPGA to ASIC |
| There are two reasons for migrating from FPGAs to ASICs, and many more reasons why that migration could easily go astray. The Fundamentals of FPGA-to-ASIC conversion presents the principles and the tools available to do it right, including a real-world example using Altera's HardCopy ASICs.
|
Dylan McGrath is editor of the EE Times Newsletter, which brings you the latest semiconductor and design news.
--