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On the costs of 0.13-micron process technology and 300-mm silicon wafer production Biostar M7NCG: another µATX mobo on NVIDIA nForce2 Triplex GF4 Ti 4800SE Deluxe specifications Innostream ships new i188 GSM900/1800 cellular handset ALi M5603C: new video camera controller with USB 2.0 support December sales of VIA and SiS reduced by over 20% Gigabyte announces GA-8SQ800 Ultra on SiS655 chipset The production of 17" iMac to be stopped in June New 700MHz R16000 MIPS proceccors from SGI On the costs of 0.13-micron process technology and 300-mm silicon wafer production Jeremey Donovan, VP and chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest, presented the report about the problems of transition to 0.13-micron process technology and 300-mm wafer production. Though these two manufacturing upgrades are being introduced together, they are not fundamentally intertwined and should be separated for analysis.The transition from 0.18µm to 0.13µm process technology, like all previous design dimension reductions, introduces design problems and mask cost problems. Design problems are pretty much borne by all vendors. The problem of mask costs, although also shared by all vendors, creates winners and losers. A 15-mask set of 0.25µm masks costs $150,000, 21 masks at 0.18µm cost $250,000, and a set of 0.13µm masks costs $600,000. The greater than 2x premium in 0.13µm mask sets over 0.18µm versions raises the volume threshold beyond which it is better to do an ASIC or ASSP than an FPGA. Before FPGA vendors jump up and down too much, $600,000 is not all that far from $250,000 in the context of the $20 million or so the average startup raises to get to first silicon. Things get interesting and more favorable for FPGA vendors at 90nm, where mask sets will cost $1.5 million, and especially at 65nm, where the price will approach $4 million. More significant than the design rule shift is the shift from 200mm to 300mm wafers. Because of rapid capital depreciation and competitive nature of the semiconductor industry, it only makes sense to build a fab if the facility can remain near 100 percent utilization. At a fairly optimistic $150 of revenue per square inch of silicon, a single 300mm wafer is worth around $20,000. Multiply that by 25,000 wafer starts per month and 12 months per year, and it is apparent that a company must sell $4.5 billion worth of semiconductors to justify owning a fab. What does all this mean? First, the move from 0.18µm to 0.13µm process technology is less disruptive than some vendors claim. Second, the move to 300mm wafers will leave fewer companies owning their own fabs. More vendors will use foundries or ink deals with competitors to build jointly owned fabs. The few that can fill 300mm fabs will pull increasingly ahead of direct competitors that choose to use foundries. With few exceptions, though, the fabless do tend to compete with the fabless, so all is not lost. Source: EE Times Asia
Biostar M7NCG: another µATX mobo on NVIDIA nForce2 Biostar Microtech announced another µATX motherboard on NVIDIA nForce2 — M7NCG. Unlike M7NCD on the discrete chipset variant, announced in December, M7NCG bases on NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (Crush 18G) + MCP-T with built-in GeForce4 MX graphics. The board supports AMD Athlon XP/Duron with 200/266/333MHz FSB, has AGP 8x slot, 3 DIMM sockets (up to 3Gb DDR200/266/333/400 SDRAM; up to 2 modules of dual-channel 128-bit DDR SDRAM), 3 PCI slots, CNR slot, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 IEEE1394a ports, integrated 6-ch. audio (NVIDIA APU Dolby Digital Encoder + Realtek ALC650 6-ch. AC´97 codec), S/PDIF, LAN (MCP NVIDIA MAC + Realtek RTL8201BL PHY). Source: The DigiTimes
Triplex GF4 Ti 4800SE Deluxe specifications VR-Zone posted specs and the first photo of GeForce4 Ti 4800SE Deluxe from Taiwanese Triplex on the new NVIDIA GF4 Ti4800 (NV28) AGP 8x GPU. Triplex GF4 Ti4800 Deluxe features 128Mb of 3.3ns BGA DDR SDRAM, 275/550MHz GPU/memory clock, VIVO, D-Sub, DVI, TV-out. The approximate price of Triplex GF4 Ti4800 Deluxe is about $330.
Innostream ships new i188 GSM900/1800 cellular handset Korean Innostream started shipments of new Innostream i188 GSM900/1800 handset, featuring:
Source: OC Workbench
ALi M5603C: new video camera controller with USB 2.0 support ALi Corporation announced new M5603C controller for video cameras. It includes color-processing engine for CMOS image sensors, image codec, USB 2.0 controller, AC97 codec and UI controller.
ALi M5603C brief specifications:
The company aims M5603C at the new SOHO PCs and mobile appliances.
December sales of VIA and SiS reduced by over 20% Due to order volumes reduction by the end of 2002, Taiwanese VIA Technologies and SiS informred about over 20% sales reduction in December comparing to the previous month.VIA reported about NT$1.856 billion sales ($53.43 million) that´s 20.2% lower than in November. SiS suffered even lower stronger 29% reduction down to NT$1.282 billion (about $36.9 million) mostly because of the weak demand and aggressive sales of some older chipsets.
Source: The DigiTimes
Gigabyte announces GA-8SQ800 Ultra on SiS655 chipset Following ASUS and Aopen, which announced their SiS655-based P4SDX and AX45-4D Max, respectively, Gigabyte released GA-8SQ800 Ultra on the same chipset.  Gigabyte GA-8SQ800 Ultra ATX bases on SiS655 + SiS963, supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 with 400/533MHz FSB, has 4 DIMM sockets (up to 4Gb Dual Channel ïàìÿòè DDR266/333 and even DDR400!), AGP 8x slot, 5 PCI slots, ATA133 RAID, two Serial ATA ports, integrated audio, LAN and USB 2.0 ports. Source: GZeasy
Source: The DigiTimes
The production of 17" iMac to be stopped in June According to Taiwanese makers, the production of popular Apple iMac with 17" LCD monitors will be stopped in June 2003. Provisional data indicates that about 500 – 600 thousand iMacs have been sold since the announcement. Perhaps, another 300 – 400 thousand will be sold before June. The sales peak was in March last year, shipments making 10,000 iMacs a day. Source: The DigiTimes
New 700MHz R16000 MIPS proceccors from SGI SGI announced its new 700MHz R16000 MIPS processors. Similar to the previous R14000A, new 64-bit 4-way superscalar R16000 feature 32Kb two-way set-associative on-chip instruction cache, 4Mb L2 cache, support MIPS 4 instruction set.No more details are available about the new CPU. I wonder what is the dissipated power of R16000. As you know, SGI claimed low energy consumption to be one of R1x000 critical aspects. As 0.13-micron R14000A dissipated just 17W at 600MHz, it enabled to install a 128-processor SGI Origin 3900 system in a single rack.
 Initially, new R16000 chips will be shipped in SGI Fuel Visual Workstations workstations with VPro 3D graphics and IRIX OS. According to SGI, the company, similar to Hewlett-Packard with its PA-RISC, plans to move to systems on 64-bit Intel CPUs: its Itanium 2-based SGI Origin systems will work under Linux. Though SGI won´t turn away from its own processors in the near future, at least last summer SGI announced the MIPS roadmap up to 2006. Source: Ace´s Hardware
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