Semiconductor Journal

Nathan Myhrvold, who used to be Microsoft's CTO and chief strategist, and Edward Jung, who used to be Microsoft's chief architect and advisor to the executive staff, have been building a patent factory since they left. It's called Intellectual Ventures LLC and it's buying up patents. Supposedly it's bought a thousand so far. It's also rounded up what it describes as a "world-class team of physicists, engineers and biotechnologists" and set them to dreaming up ideas to patent. The spread runs to lasers, semiconductors, electronic widgets, consumer products, software, e-commerce, communications, medical devices, computer architecture and molecular algorithms not to mention nanotechnology, biotechnology and bioinformatics. They've been at it since 2000 and according to the Patent and Trademark Office the company has socked away a small cache of patents in its own name. ... (more)

Preparing for the Revolution

There's revolution (or evolution) occurring in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry. Recently both AMD and Intel introduced chips with multiple processing units in a single package. Instead of having one central processor, or brain, computers will now have multiple brains with which to run programs. While this technique isn't new, it's the first time these types of architectures have been mass-produced and sold to the commodity PC and server markets. This revolution will affect everyone who uses a computer including high-performance clustered systems. From laptops to ga... (more)

Ulitzer to Give Drupal 6.0 Its Biggest Scalability Challenge Yet

Ulitzer.com, which initially made the headlines with its "job descriptions from the future," announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer "beta" site with more than 16,000 authors and more than 1 million original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most-respected authors in their fields. All Ulitzer authors will earn 100% of their Google AdSense revenue. See author index here. All approved Ulizter authors can post a variety of story types: 01) Article 02) Blog 03) B... (more)

SkyCross Receives $14 Million Investment Led by TL Ventures

MELBOURNE, Fla., Jan. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- SkyCross, a leading developer of advanced wireless antenna solutions, today announced the closure of a $14 million round of financing led by TL Ventures. TL Ventures is an esteemed investment firm engaged in venture capital for more than 17 years with over $1.4 billion under management focusing on communications, IT and semiconductors. The investment will provide capital to fuel continued growth at Skycross. This investment reinforces a string of SkyCross design successes in the wireless marketplace, including numerous embedded antennas fo... (more)

EEMBC Unveils Certified Performance + Energy Benchmark Scores for IBM's PowerPC(R) 750CL Power Architecture(TM) Processor

EL DORADO HILLS, Calif., March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- New certified benchmark scores published today for IBM's PowerPC(R) 750CL are the broadest application to date for EEMBC's EnergyBench(TM) power/energy benchmark tool, providing extensive data on the "cost" of processor performance for the 750CL across several distinct application areas. The 800-MHz PowerPC 750CL, part of IBM's Power Architecture(TM) technology line of embedded processors, was simultaneously tested against EnergyBench and five EEMBC(R) processor benchmark suites that approximate device performance in automotive, ... (more)