Yah a bit of merger madness, NEC Electronics has merged with Renesas, further consolidating the Japanese microcontroller market. This will put the new company third in global IC sales, behind only Intel and Samsung.  It will be interesting to see which products survive the merger, as there will be some overlap.

What does this mean for CPU collectors? Just as happened when Mitsubishi and Hitachi merged, deprecated and eliminated devices will become increasingly hard to find data on.

Source: EE Times

In case you missed it last week, GlobalFoundries (the company AMD spun off to manage its foundries) has acquired Chartered Semiconductor in Singapore.  This changes the playing field a lot in the foundry world.  A world dominated by UMC and TSMC.

Acquiring Chartered allows GlobalFoundries to dissolve some of AMDs interest in the company, as well as bring on board many more customers.  Before, Global only had AMD, and STm as clients, now they have all of Chartered’s which includes such names as Toshiba, and Microsoft.

A game changer for sure. While they are not as big as TSMC, they certainly will be making TSMC look over their shoulder more.  This will help the foundry industry remain competitive and force TSMC and GlobalFoundries to remain innovative and on the cutting edge of fab technology.

The SuperH line of microcontrollers (really full up processors now) was originally developed by Hitachi.  They have found wide use in applications spanning printer controllers to automobile control systems.  Renesas just announced yet another member of the SuperH family. The SH7264 and SH7262 both include the now common SH-2A RISC core running at 144MHz as well as a FPU, but now integrate up to 1Mbyte of SRAM on die as well as many video functions.

Renesas SuperH SH7264 and SH7262

These chips can now drive displays without the need of external RAM, saving cost, and board space.  Expect to see them in such things as car navigation systems, copy machines and the like.

Source: eeProductCenter

Its chip related I suppose, but mostly just really cool and they make awesome desktop wallpapers.

Die Wallpaper

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