Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said that consumer spending led to a turnaround in computer purchases in the fourth quarter. That, in turn, led to one of Intel’s most profitable quarters ever.

Otellini said server chip sales were strong thanks to a product refresh cycle. Intel launched its Nehalem-based server chips in the spring and stayed ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices, launching multiple products that made server customers spend more on average. That spending continued in the fourth quarter.

“We are entering 2010 in a very strong position,” Otellini said in a conference call with analysts.

Otellini said Intel will refresh its entire server product line in the coming months as it brings online its 32-nanometer manufacturing process. Last week, Intel launched 25 new chips, including 32-nm chips aimed at consumers. Demand for those new products is excellent, Otellini said.

Intel started moving from 45-nanometer manufacturing to 32-nanometer for consumer chips in the past few months; when it makes such a change, Intel can introduce faster, cheaper, and lower-cost products. On that front, it is well ahead of its rival Advanced Micro Devices. As customers create more power-efficient data centers and demand shifts toward cloud-based services, Intel’s server products are benefiting.

On the low-end consumer side, Otellini said Atom chips are selling well. The Atom chips are low-power devices that power netbooks, which are smaller than laptops and are meant for web surfing. The new Pinetrail-based Atom chips appeared in 80 different netbook designs. There are 600 Atom-based design wins, 2,000 design plans, across 230 different customers in the embedded space, where Atom processors power non-PC devices. Some 93 of the 230 are brand new customers for Intel.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Intel and its partners showed off a lot of consumer electronics devices with Atom chips, including the new LG smartphone based on Intel’s upcoming Morristown Atom platform. Otellini said that Atom is thus getting into handheld devices, and there will be more announced on that later.

Otellini said that the supply chain isn’t bloated and is operating efficiently. Intel saw stronger sell-through and lower inventory levels compared to a year ago. Overall inventory rose because of the transition to 32-nanometer products. Capital spending was $4.5 billion, down from the original forecast of $5.2 billion and less than the annual depreciation amount. Intel credited efficient production for the lower spending. At $440,000, revenue per employee in 2009 was the third highest in Intel’s history.

Otellini said that 2009 was an unusual year in that “the lights went off” for the first half of the year and sales recovered strongly in the second half. Stacy Smith, chief financial officer, said that the market bottomed in the first quarter. Microsoft’s launch of Windows 7 gave the company strong sales in the fall.


[venturebeat]

The University of Tokyo developed the "organic flash memory," a non-volatile memory that has the same basic structure as a flash memory and is made with organic materials.

The erasing and reading voltages of the new flash memory are as low as 6V and 1V, respectively. Data can be written in and erased from the memory more than 1,000 times.

With its flexibility, the flash memory can be used for large-area sensors, electronic paper and other large-area electronic devices if its memory retention time can be extended, the university said.

The organic flash memory was developed by a research group led by Takeo Someya and Tsuyoshi Sekitani, professor and research associate at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. The research results were published on the 11th December 2009 issue of Science magazine.

The research group used a polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) resin sheet as a substrate and arranged 26 x 26 2T memory cells in an array structure on it. The sheet is flexible, and the university confirmed that it can be bent until its curvature radius reaches 6mm without causing mechanical or electrical degradation. The university also confirmed that the sheet can be used as a non-volatile memory.

Furthermore, the research group made an "intelligent pressure sensor," which can retain a pressure image in the sheet, by integrating the memory array and a pressure sensor.

The new memory is called "organic flash memory" because it is equipped with floating-gate transistors, which are also used for silicon-based flash memories. Specifically, the PEN substrate is mounted with aluminum (Al) control gate electrodes, insulating films, aluminum floating gates, organic semiconductor pentacene, and source and gate electrodes made of gold (Au).

The insulating film was made by using a self-assembled monolayer (SAM), which is made of a kind of phosphoric acid having an alkyl chain (CH₂-CH₂-CH₂-...), in addition to AlOx. The SAM is as thin as 2nm.

There are non-volatile memories developed in the past. One is made by using ferroelectric materials, and the other has a floating-gate structure like the latest non-volatile memory. However, it is difficult to lower the writing and erasing voltages of the former memory than 20V. The latter memory also has a high erasing voltage. And it becomes unstable when exposed to air because its memory properties fluctuate due to the nonconstant thickness of the insulating film.

This time, the university researchers employed an SAM whose insulating film does not require thickness control to reduce the variation in memory properties. Moreover, this SAM is stable in the atmosphere.

As a disadvantage, the new organic flash memory has a memory retention time of only one day. But this can be drastically improved by reducing the size of the element and employing an SAM with a long molecular length, the university said.





[techon]

Worldwide sales of semiconductors rose to $21.7 billion in October, a 5.1 percent increase from September when sales were $20.6 billion, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported today.

Sales are 3.5 percent below October 2008 when sales were $22.5 billion. Sales for the first 10 months of 2009 were $180.0 billion, a decline of 16.6 percent from the like period of 2008 when sales were $215.8 billion.  All monthly sales numbers represent a three-month moving average of global semiconductor sales.

“October is historically a strong month for the semiconductor industry as electronic equipment manufacturers ramp production for the holiday season. Inventory management throughout the supply chain has been very tight, and this may extend the fourth-quarter build season by a few weeks,” Scalise continued.  

“As Semiconductor sales are increasingly driven by the performance of the overall global economy our sales are reflecting the improved economic conditions in our world markets. Sales increased sequentially in all geographic regions,” Scalise concluded.




[sia]

Broadband communications chip maker MaxLinear has filed to go public in another indicator that the good times are back for tech stocks and exits.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based MaxLinear makes analog or mixed-signal radio chips that can be manufactured in standard chip factories. The chips enable devices to display broadband video. The chips are used in a wide array of electronic gear: cable and terrestrial set-top boxes, digital TVs, cell phones, PCs, netbooks and car entertainment systems. The company has more than 35 customers, including Panasonic, Murata, Alps Electric and Sony.

MaxLinear was founded in 2003. Since shipping its first products in 2006, the company has shipped more than 65 million radio chips. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, revenues were $36.1 million, up from $23.6 million a year earlier. Net income was $2.4 million for the period, compared to a loss of $1.1 million a year earlier.

The market for radio frequency, digital signal processors and analog chips used in set-top boxes, mobile phones, autos and TVs was $7.6 billion, according to market researcher iSuppli.

Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities are handling the offering. Co-managers include UBS Securities, Thomas Weisel Partners and Needham & Co. It’s good to see a chip company filing to go public. It often takes so much investment these days that chip makers have a hard time finding venture capital funding.





About MaxLinear

MaxLinear is a leading provider of highly integrated, radio-frequency analog and mixed signal semiconductor solutions for broadband communications applications. Our high performance radio-frequency, or RF, receiver products capture and process digital and analog broadband signals to be decoded for various applications. These products include both RF receivers and RF receiver systems-on-chip, or SoCs, which incorporate our highly integrated radio system architecture and the functionality necessary to demodulate broadband signals.

Our current products enable the display of broadband video in a wide range of electronic devices, including cable and terrestrial set top boxes, digital televisions, mobile handsets, personal computers, netbooks and in-vehicle entertainment devices. We combine our high performance RF and mixed signal semiconductor design skills with our expertise in digital communications systems, software and embedded systems to provide highly integrated semiconductor devices that are manufactured using low-cost complementary metal oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, process technology.

At MaxLinear, we aim to be the leading provider of mixed signal RF receivers and RF receiver SoCs for stationary and mobile broadband video and data communications applications and, in the future, to leverage this core competency to expand into other communications markets with similar performance requirements.

[venturebeat]