The 2010 semiconductor market did not top $300bn as was widely expected, says the SIA, instead it came in at $298.3bn. However the annual growth did meet general expectations by topping 30%. The SIA puts it at 31.8% up from the $226.3bn recorded for 2009. The SIA put Q4 sales at $75.5bn representing a 4% decline on Q3. For December, ...

Tensilica today announced that Fujitsu has signed a multi-year corporate license for Tensilica’s audio, baseband DSP and dataplane processor units (DPUs), which are a combination of DSP and embedded control processor cores for SOC design. The contract gives access to Tensilica IP cores for all Fujitsu divisions. “It’s a big broad corporate licence with a very wide scope,” Chris Rowen, ...

The CMX148 PMR audio and data processor from CML Microsystems is for half-duplex audio, signalling and data processing

Microchip’s Bluetooth evaluation kit, which includes CandleDragon’s dotstack demonstration Bluetooth Stack can be used for 16/32-bit PIC microcontrollers or dsP

The programmable logic market first hit $3 billion in 2000, and it didn’t make $4 billion until 2010, according to Ed Lepkowski of L-Mar Associates.

Cambridge Temperature Concepts is the European finalist in Qualcomm Venture's QPrize competition.

Xilinx plans to add System C high level design to its 6- and 7-series FPGA families with the acquisition of design tool firm AutoESL Design Technologies. According to Tom Feist, a senior marketing director at Xilinx, the use of level-higher design synthesis in System C, as well as C and C++, will “address the ease of use issues” which have ...

Powerchip of Taiwan is to drop selling proprietary DRAM in favour of acting as a DRAM foundry for Elpida. The deal allows Elpida to increase its DRAM sales without having to make any additional investment in capex. ‘It will allow both companies to focus on their core competencies,’ says Elpida, ‘Elpida’s sales and marketing and technology development strengths, and Powerchip’s ...

ARM has added Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 to its range of processors for hard real-time embedded processing. They offer 750 and 1,250DMips respectively for baseband processing in phones, where they are expected to take over from ARM9 and ARM11 in 3.5G, 3.9G and 4G phones. R5 is similar to the preceding Cortex-R4, with changes to simplify programming – largely adding automatic ...

Global shipments of smartphones reached 94 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010, an increase of 75% compared to the same period in 2009, according to Strategy Analytics.