Systems and Components Briefs

AMD Broadens Its Scope Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will acquire Alchemy Semiconductor, a privately held company that designs, develops and markets high-performance, low-power MIPS-based microprocessors for personal connectivity devices, such as personal digital assistants, Web tablets, and portable and wired Internet-access devices and gateways. The acquisition is expected to be completed this month and will allow AMD to form a new division to focus on non-PC connectivity devices.

Honing Blade-Server Specs Hewlett-Packard has released an open, enhanced specification for blade servers, which stack numerous independent lower-end servers within a single cabinet. Called OpenBlade, the spec is designed to drive the development of standards-based, blade-server architectures and provide customers with interoperable, multivendor blade-server solutions. Additionally, HP announced a fivefold increase in the number of partners in the HP Blade Server Alliance Program. Similarly, Compaq announced the availability of the ProLiant BL e-Class,

the first tier of the new Compaq ProLiant BL line of industry-standard server blades. A vote on the proposed merger of the two companies is slated for March 19 for HP shareholders, March 20 for Compaq shareholders.

Less Space, Better Design A 200-MHz RISC processor has become the first integrated circuit to be successfully laid out with diagonal interconnect lines as proposed under the "X Architecture"

initiative, according to a technical paper presented by Toshiba, its ArTile Microsystems subsidiary and Simplex Solutions at the recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The paper reported that the X Architecture resulted in a 20

percent improvement in design performance and 10 percent savings in design area.

News (About) Flash Samsung Electron- ics recently announced that it's launching a new line of high-capacity CompactFlash (CF) Type I cards. The new line of CF cards is now available in densities of 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB and 512 MB. CF Type I cards are used in handheld devices, including personal digital assistants, cell phones, digital cameras and subnotebook PCs. Looking ahead, the Seoul,

Korea-based electronics maker will introduce a 1-GB CF card

in the third quarter. Samsung also plans to enter the MultiMediaCard market with the introduction of a range of high-capacity MultiMediaCards in the fourth quarter.

90-nm Process Technology Debuts Texas Instruments (TI) has announced its next-

generation 90-nanometer, or 0.09-micron, logic-manufacturing process technology, featuring transistors as small as 37 nm,a width 2,000 times smaller than the thickness of newsprint. With the ability to pack more than 400 million transistors on a single chip, TI's technology will drive cost-effective, system-on-a-chip solutions with high levels of performance and power savings for TI digital-signal processing, high-performance, application-specific integrated circuits and Sun Microsystems-designed UltraSPARC processor products. According to TI, the combination of copper, low-k dielectric material, the industry's highest SRAM density and TI's 37-nm transistor will advance TI's leading-edge DSP and Sun's UltraSPARC processor products in the 90-nm process.