Japan: a competitive assessment

Article Abstract:

The Japanese supercomputer market is highly competitive and continues to thrive but the US manufacturers retain dominance in the industry. Japan's three major developers are NEC Corp, Fujitsu Ltd and Hitachi Ltd. Japan has about 125 supercomputers, half of which are Fujitsu models. Statistics from 1989 indicate that Japan had a total research and development budget of $7.5 billion toward creating supercomputers. Despite the financial backing, Japan's companies are still several years behind the US's Cray Computer Co. Japanese companies have utilized the high-speed single processor designs and have tried to produce faster chips with smaller sizes, and they are working towards heat reduction and the removal of logic bugs. Software development is still far behind the hardware achievements, but future research should provide better software options.

Japan, Supercomputers, Supercomputer, Trends, Industry Analysis, Outlook

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A fast path to one memory: a proprietary scheme for a unified memory system covers all design aspects to ensure fast display and quick computation

Article Abstract:

Rambus Inc develops a fully specified memory architecture that can keep up with the fastest processors. The architecture is cost-effective for all applications and covers devices, buses, interfaces, protocols and controllers. The architecture optimizes performance from a system-level perspective in that complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) and the circuit board transfer blocks of data as quickly as is physically possible. Such computers require no caches, yet graphics performance is improved by up to five times compared to video RAM. The company uses unique DRAMs and a high-performance, chip-to-chip interface in place of extant memory types and their interconnects, and a high-speed channel is implemented. A byte of data is delivered by the Rambus DRAM every two nanoseconds for a block of information up to 256 bytes long.

Semiconductor industry, Computer memory, Rambus Inc., Memory, Product introduction, Processor speeds, Memory (Computers), Processor Speed, New Technique

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The ultimate dielectric is... nothing: IBM packs wires in vacuum to speed chips and save power

Article Abstract:

IBM has developed an air-gap technology that insulates the wires on a microchip thereby minimizing the effect of the signal of one wire to its neighbor. The technology enables the recovery of between ten and 15 percent of chip speed that would otherwise be lost.

Semiconductor and Related Device Manufacturing, Product development, Integrated & Hybrid Circuits, Integrated Circuits, United States, Evaluation, Semiconductor chips, Microcomputer industry, International Business Machines Corp., IBM, Integrated circuit design, Standard IC, Circuit designer

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