Sony developed optical pickup for mobile Blu-Ray Disc devices

Samsung to build another 12 inch fab

Pocket LOOX — in Europe at first

PCI-SIG Board of Directors approved PCI-X 2.0

ATI FIRE GL X1: new professional graphics

Dothan, 90 nm Banias successor, and other Intel?s mobile line updates

Sony developed optical pickup for mobile Blu-Ray Disc devices

At ISOM/ODS Sony reported about the development of small-sized pickup supporing the Blu-ray Disc standard for next-generation recording and playback devices.

Striving to meet the miniaturization requirements for the secodn-generation optical drives (Blu-ray Disc), Sony halved optical-system parts from 16 to 8. At that outside dimensions were reduced to 11x6x4.1 mm. According to the company, such thickness will enable to integrate such drives into any kind of portable PC.

The module features a blue-violet semiconductor laser, photodetectors, a polarizing prism, a mirror, a diffraction grating, a cylindrical lens, hologram elements and a half-wave plate.

The semiconductor laser element is manufactured by Sony Shiroishi Semiconductor. Its power consumption is about three times higher than infrared-semiconductor lasers for mini discs.

Samsung to build another 12 inch fab

The company plans to invest about 2.5 billion won ($2.1 billion) for 300 mm production lines, including Fab 11. About a billion won will be invested in H1 2003 to raise production capacity from current 7,000 wafers to 15,000-20,000 wafers in H1 and 30,000 wafers in H2.

Now Samsung uses only a part of its Fab 11, producing both 200 mm, and 300 mm wafers. The second part will be used for 300 mm wafers and 0.13 micron process technology for making 256 and 512 Mbit DRAM chips.

Pocket LOOX — in Europe at first

Device brief specifications are: 64MB RAM , 32MB ROM, 240È320 TFT LCD display, 65536 colors, built-in mic, speaker and headphone jack, serial port, USB and IrDA, size — 123x82x17 mm, weight — 175 gr.

It slightly differs from the original information from Japanese PC Watch — according to the source, Pocket LOOX also features Bluetooth and GPRS support (the latter with a special module). This might explain the difference in prices as well.

PCI-SIG Board of Directors approved PCI-X 2.0

PCI-X 2.0 specifications define two new PCI-X card variants: PCI-X 266 and PCI-X 533. The former feature 266 MHz bus clock rate and provide over 2.1 GB/sec bandwidth. PCI-X 533 operate at up to 533 MHz clock rate, providing over 4.2 GB/sec bandwidth. It is more than enough for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel, Serial Attached SCSI, Serial ATA (SATA), InfiniBand, RAID and cluster interconnects for servers and workstations.

PCI-X 2.0 expands the popular PCI-X 1.0 specifications with such features, as byte counts and split transactions, PCI-X 2.0 also supports Error Checking and Correction (ECC).

The new standard is backward compatible with previous PCI versions, enabling faster PCI-X 2.0 motherboards and systems deployment.

ATI FIRE GL X1: new professional graphics

So, it has repeated with the recent announcement of RADEON 9700, that will be the foundation for workstation FIRE GL X1 solutions.

ATI FIRE GL X1 is planned to October, and expected to feature fully progammable architecture and floating point calculations for OpenGL 2.0 and Microsoft DirectX 9, 8 concurrent rendering pipelines, photo-realistic real-time rendering, etc.

FIRE GL X1 cards will have up to 256MB of 256-bit DDR memory, will support AGP 8X, SMARTSHADER 2.0. Naturally, FIRE GL X1 will be supplied with special, application-oriented drivers. Information about pricing and full specifications are yet to be announced.

Dothan, 90 nm Banias successor, and other Intel?s mobile line updates

So, introducing a new name: Dothan. This processor, to replace Banias, may presumably appear in 4Q 2003, being made according to 0.09 micron process technology, supporting 400 MHz FSB, up to 2MB L2 cache. Dothan will be used with Banias chipsets — Odem and Montara GM.

And this will presumably be the closest Intel mobile roadmap and pricing:

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