Much analysis and detective work have been devoted to understanding what Intel's dabbling in the foundry business means. However, trying to read those tea leaves is a fool's errand. We do not yet know how involved Intel will eventually become in the foundry market. And neither does Intel.

Like my colleagues, I do not believe that Intel is poised to jump whole hog into the foundry business, competing with the likes of TSMC, UMC and Globalfoundries. The world's biggest chip vendor has in recent years dipped its toe in the foundry waters through deals with companies lik......

It is indeed quite interesting (and refreshing) that Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, pulled no punches when asked a question about rival AMD's recent acquisition of microserver start-up SeaMicro Inc. Bryant said, among other things, that Intel had passed on the opportunity to acquire the company before AMD's announcement.

"We did look at SeaMicro's fabric," Bryant said. "There are probably very few people they didn't come to and shop their technology. We were not impressed. We decli......

It was a sttunning news, teven if not completely unexpected: Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple Inc., who will be remembered for—among many other things—his showmanship and larger-than-life public persona, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family.

In the coming hours, days, weeks and years, there will be volumes written about Jobs, his impact and his legacy. Many will wax eloquently about the man who transcended electronics and literally changed the world during two stints at the company he helped build. No doubt, some of these endeavors will o......

Microsoft has already released the developer version of Windows 8, its next-generation operating system. Right now, developers are working with it, writing applications and spotting bugs.

We still have no timeline on the official release date for Windows 8 (still the codename, not the official name, of the operating system, by the way). Rumours—as rumours tend to do—abound, with prognostications for the OS's street date ranging from late this year to late next year, or even later.

But even the most credible of these predictions are nothing more th......

Relax and settle down now. Despite Steve Jobs' resignation, Apple will do just fine.

Investors freaked out after Jobs resigned as Apple CEO Wednesday (Aug. 24), sending the company's stock price down 5 percent in after-hours trading (and costing Jobs tens of millions of dollars, on paper). This knee-jerk investor reaction should come as no surprise—even though many suspected that there was at least a possibility Jobs would not return to full time CEO duties after he went out on medical leave in January.

Let's face it: there is a lot of hero worship as......

Trying to persuade Pasquale Pistorio to show off an award—even one as prestigious as the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal—is a fool's errand.

Some executives have a disconcerting habit of slipping into the first person when talking about their companies (i.e. "I can ship twice as much product as my closest competitor" or "I moved some of my manufacturing to China.")

Pistorio is basically the antithesis of these people. Urged to elaborate on his feelings about the Noyce Medal—which he picked up over the weekend in a ceremony in S......

Imagine this: Intel Corp., whose x86 architecture is locked in a struggle for supremacy with the ARM architecture, could actually be a perspective buyer of Texas Instruments Inc.'s (TI) line of ARM-based applications processors. That's according to speculation by an analyst.

For  the past few weeks, rumors have been circulating that TI is attempting to sell off its OMAP division. Most recently, the technology news site Semiaccurate reported Tuesday (Aug. 16) that Broadcom Corp. is considering the acquisition of OMAP. 

Predictably, TI won&#......

John Bruggeman, Cadence Design Systems Inc. chief marketing officer for almost two years, is suddenly out the door (almost). He has been the face and voice of Cadence Design Systems Inc. for most of his two-year tenure. At least one analyst believes the move portends a change in leadership at the firm.

Gary Smith, principal analyst at Gary Smith EDA, said the surprising departure of Bruggeman—who will remain at Cadence as a "non-executive employee" through Aug. 14—is part of a reorganization of marketing functions to pave the way for CEO Lip-Bu Tan to ha......

According to a paper recently published by a team of German researchers, the bitstream encryption mechanism of Xilinx Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 FPGAs can be "completely broken with moderate effort" through side-channel analysis attacks, posing a potential risk of IP theft and more serious attacks such as reverse engineering or the introduction of hardware Trojans.

The researchers—Amir Moradi, Markus Kasper and Christof Paar of the Horst Gortz Institute for IT-Security at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany—reported using off-the-shelf hardware......

What's not to love about a storyline that matches off semiconductor process technology leaders Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) against one another in a race to achieve some high-level technical goal?

Last week, a report by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), a nonprofit organization promoting trade with Taiwanese firms, did just that, issuing a report that tantalizingly suggested that TSMC might beat Intel to the punch in bringing "three-dimensional chips" to market. EE Times and other news organizatio......