NVIDIA announced today that it has named Rob Burgess, a veteran technology executive and independent consultant, to its board of directors. Burgess, age 53, served as chief executive officer of Macromedia, Inc., a provider of Internet and multimedia software, from 1996 to 2005, and as the company's chairman or executive chairman from 1998 to 2005, when it was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc. He has been a member of Adobe's board since then, and has served since 2010 as a director of IMRIS Inc., a provider of image-guided therapy solutions.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced today that Mark Papermaster, 50, has joined as the company's senior vice president and chief technology officer. He will report to President and Chief Executive Officer Rory Read and will oversee all of AMD's engineering, research and development (R&D), and product development functions as the head of the newly-formed Technology and Engineering Group. Papermaster, who was most recently vice president of Silicon Engineering at Cisco, will be responsible for establishing and executing the company's technology and product roadmaps, integrated hardware and software development, and overseeing the creation of all of AMD's products.

The advanced research and development team led by Senior Vice President of Research and Development Chekib Akrout, as well as the engineering teams residing in AMD's Products Group, will now report to Papermaster. Akrout, 53, will maintain responsibility for leading AMD's processor core development as well as system-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology. In recognition of his ongoing technical and management contributions, Akrout will continue serving on AMD's senior leadership team responsible for key decision making and strategy setting.

Elpida Memory, Inc., Japan's leading global supplier of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), today announced that it had completed development of a 30nm process 2-gigabit DDR3 SDRAM. The new 2-gigabit DDR3 SDRAM used 30nm-level advanced process migration technology to create the DRAM industry's smallest-level 2-gigabit DDR3 SDRAM. It achieves 45% more chips per wafer compared with Elpida's 40nm process products. Also, the new process design developed by Elpida will help contain rising chip costs associated with process migration. As a result, the 2-gigabit DDR3 is slated to become an extremely cost-competitive product.

Elpida's new chip meets the JEDEC specs for the high-speed DDR3-1866 and 1.35V low-voltage, high-speed DDR3L-1600 memory chips, both expected to become mainstream industry products in 2011. Also, the 30nm DDR3 SDRAM is eco-friendly. As a DDR3 SDRAM it achieves one of the industry's lowest levels of electric current usage (approximately 15% less operating and approximately 10% less standby usage compared with Elpida's 40nm products), which contributes to lower PC and digital consumer electronics power consumption.

At next week's Design Automation Conference (DAC), GLOBALFOUNDRIES will unveil a new platform to spur innovation in semiconductor manufacturing and help deliver unparalleled service to chip designers. Called GLOBALSOLUTIONS, the new ecosystem combines the company's internal resources with a broad spectrum of partners to efficiently enable the fastest time-to-volume for foundry customers.

"As chip design grows in complexity and manufacturing partnerships become increasingly critical, foundry customer enablement needs to extend beyond process design kits and reference flows to include the full spectrum of the semiconductor value chain," said Jim Kupec, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. "To this end, GLOBALSOLUTIONS includes ecosystem partners in all aspects of design enablement, turnkey services, design for manufacturability, optical proximity correction and mask operations, and will further expand our capabilities in advanced assembly solutions. This will allow our customers to unlock their innovation potential and differentiate at all levels of the design process, from the silicon and SoC level all the way up to the full system."

DisplayLink Corp. today celebrated reaching sales of more than one million USB graphics semiconductors. Embedded in more than thirty consumer and business products, DisplayLink chips - the DL-120 and DL-160 - make it possible for people to connect various visual computing devices to displays with an easy USB connection.

"DisplayLink has completely reinvented the way computers talk to displays. Our IC's make it possible to use standard plug and play USB to connect a laptop to one or more displsys, bringing the world a major step closer to the ideal "single world connector" status. Achieving sales of one million chips clearly shows the mainstream reach of our technology with customers and end-users who readily appreciate the simplicity of our approach and the productivity benefits of using multiple displays" said Hamid Farzaneh, president and CEO of DisplayLink.

Western Digital Corp., a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems' product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART, SolidStor and SiSecure technologies.

The SOI Industry Consortium has announced that NVIDIA has joined the organization. NVIDIA now joins a league of companies such as AMD, Applied Materials, ARM, Cadence Design Systems, CEA-Léti, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Innovative Silicon, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, Magma Design, Samsung, Semico, Soitec, SEH Europe, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Tyndall Institute, UCL and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC).

So what is SOI? Silicon on Insulator technology involves use of variable layered silicon-insulator-silicon substratum, used to minimize parasitic device capacitance and thereby improve performance.

US engineers at Princeton University have managed to develop a new method for producing computer chips using carbon instead of the silicon used in current chips. As silicon is now reaching its limit, researchers have been searching for an alternative material to use for the last few years. Graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, could potentially process information and produce radio transmissions ten times more efficiently than silicon, which makes it an ideal replacement. The problem until now has been that engineers believed that they would need graphene in the same form as silicon to make chips, which would require a single crystal 8" or 12" wide. Graphene crystals have only been made a couple of millimetres wide so far, which is not big enough to produce chips. However, the new technique involves using small crystals of graphene in the active part of the chip, which would not require a big wafer. This could help to fuel future chip development and allow for much faster computers.