This Week in EBN Daily News Digest Print Archives Search Electronics Industry News Broadcast Business Semiconductors Supply Chain Mgmt. With lower power dissipation becoming more important for networking systems with increasing performance demands and fixed cooling capabilities, QED said its new products will dissipate less than a third of the power of their closest competition.
Power dissipation turns out to be very important.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. The initial chips are sampling now at 400 MHz, and the company will improve that speed to 450 MHz in the third quarter. By the end of the year, QED expects to shrink again to 0.15-micron technology, and increase the speed to 500 MHz. The chips are all based on the MIPS architecture, and feature a five-stage pipeline. Later versions will likely shift to a seven-stage pipeline as the frequencies increase beyond 500 MHz, but Keane said shorter pipelines are more efficient. Keane said his main competition comes from Motorola Inc.'s PowerPC devices.