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Simtek Corporation
Simtek Corporation, headquartered in Colorado Springs, CO, was an early leader in the development of SONOS memory technology which it used in its nvSRAM product line which featured a SONOS Flash memory coupled with an SRAM shadow memory to achieve both speed and non-volatility. The company was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor in September 2008. Simtek was a fabless company that relied on wafer foundry manufacturing support from Chartered Semiconductor, DongBu HiTek, and Cypress. History Simtek Corporation was founded in 1987 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The company sold a product called the NOVRAM (nonvolatile RAM) a Non-volatile random-access memory that combined a shadow-RAM (SRAM) with an EEPROM. It was designed to allow the SRAM to operate (at high SRAM speeds) for most of the time, but when it received a signal (usually sent by the system when a power failure was imminent) the entire contents of the SRAM were copied into the EEPROM at a very high speed thanks ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Company
A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange ( listed company), which facilitates the trade of shares, or not ( unlisted public company). In some jurisdictions, public companies over a certain size must be listed on an exchange. In most cases, public companies are ''private'' enterprises in the ''private'' sector, and "public" emphasizes their reporting and trading on the public markets. Public companies are formed within the legal systems of particular states, and therefore have associations and formal designations which are distinct and separate in the polity in which they reside. In the United States, for example, a public company is usually a type of corporation (though a corporation need not be a public company), in the United Kingdom it is usually a public limited company (plc), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiconductor Fabrication Plant
In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant (commonly called a fab; sometimes foundry) is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured. Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates put the cost of building a new fab over one billion U.S. dollars with values as high as $3–4 billion not being uncommon. TSMC invested $9.3 billion in its ''Fab15'' 300 mm wafer manufacturing facility in Taiwan. The same company estimations suggest that their future fab might cost $20 billion. A foundry model emerged in the 1990s: Foundries that produced their own designs were known as integrated device manufacturers (IDMs). Companies that farmed out manufacturing of their designs to foundries were termed fabless semiconductor companies. Those foundries, which did not create their own designs, were called pure-play semiconductor foundries. The central part of a fab is the clean room, an area where the environment is controll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EE Times
''EE Times'' (''Electronic Engineering Times'') is an electronics industry magazine published in the United States since 1972. EE Times is currently owned by AspenCore, a division of Arrow Electronics since August 2016. Since its acquisition by AspenCore, EE Times has seen major editorial and publishing technology investment and a renewed emphasis on investigative coverage. New features include The Dispatch, which profiles frontline engineers and unpacks the real-life design problems and their solutions in technical yet conversational reporting. Ownership and status ''EE Times'' was launched in 1972 by Gerard G. Leeds of CMP Publications Inc. In 1999, the Leeds family sold CMP to United Business Media for $900 million. After 2000, ''EE Times'' moved more into web publishing. The shift in advertising from print to online began to accelerate in 2007 and the periodical shed staff to adjust to the downturn in revenue. In July 2013, the digital edition migrated to UBM TechWe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EEPROM
EEPROM (also called E2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as a separate chip device to store relatively small amounts of data by allowing individual bytes to be erased and reprogrammed. EEPROMs are organized as arrays of floating-gate transistors. EEPROMs can be programmed and erased in-circuit, by applying special programming signals. Originally, EEPROMs were limited to single-byte operations, which made them slower, but modern EEPROMs allow multi-byte page operations. An EEPROM has a limited life for erasing and reprogramming, now reaching a million operations in modern EEPROMs. In an EEPROM that is frequently reprogrammed, the life of the EEPROM is an important design consideration. Flash memory is a type of EEPROM designed for high speed and high density, at the expense of large erase blocks ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Random-access Memory
Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks, CD-RWs, DVD-RWs and the older magnetic tapes and drum memory), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry, to connect the data lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the entry. Usually more than one bit of storage is accessed by the same address, and RAM devices often have multiple data lines and are said to be "8-bit" or "16-bit", etc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Non-volatile Random-access Memory
Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is random-access memory that retains data without applied power. This is in contrast to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM), which both maintain data only for as long as power is applied, or forms of sequential-access memory such as magnetic tape, which cannot be randomly accessed but which retains data indefinitely without electric power. Read-only memory devices can be used to store system firmware in embedded systems such as an automotive ignition system control or home appliance. They are also used to hold the initial processor instructions required to bootstrap a computer system. Read-write memory can be used to store calibration constants, passwords, or setup information, and may be integrated into a microcontroller. If the main memory of a computer system were non-volatile, it would greatly reduce the time required to start a system after a power interruption. Current existing types of semi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Colorado Springs is a home rule municipality in, and the county seat of, El Paso County, Colorado, United States. It is the largest city in El Paso County, with a population of 478,961 at the 2020 United States Census, a 15.02% increase since 2010. Colorado Springs is the second-most populous city and the most extensive city in the state of Colorado, and the 40th-most populous city in the United States. It is the principal city of the Colorado Springs metropolitan area and the second-most prominent city of the Front Range Urban Corridor. It is located in east-central Colorado, on Fountain Creek, south of Denver. At the city stands over above sea level. Colorado Springs is near the base of Pikes Peak, which rises above sea level on the eastern edge of the Southern Rocky Mountains. History The Ute, Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples were the first recorded inhabiting the area which would become Colorado Springs. Part of the territory included in the United States ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chartered Semiconductor
Chartered Semiconductor was created in 1987, as a venture that included Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd. Yet, it was not until 2000, that ST Engineering (Singapore Technologies Semiconductors), a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings wholly acquired Chartered. Prior to 2010, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (abbreviated CSM) was the world's third largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, with its headquarters and main operations located in the Woodlands Industrial Park, Kranji Singapore. The company was listed on the Singapore Exchange under the trading symbol of CHARTERED, as well as on NASDAQ (CHRT), until its buyout. Fabrication facilities Chartered provides comprehensive wafer fabrication services and technologies to semiconductor suppliers and systems companies. Chartered's customer base is primarily high-growth, technologically advanced companies operating in the communication, computer and consumer sectors. It does not provide design service ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fabless
Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclusively, located in the United States, China, and Taiwan. Fabless companies can benefit from lower capital costs while concentrating their research and development resources on the end market. Some fabless companies and pure play foundries (like TSMC) may offer integrated-circuit design services to third parties. History Prior to the 1980s, the semiconductor industry was vertically integrated. Semiconductor companies owned and operated their own silicon-wafer fabrication facilities and developed their own process technology for manufacturing their chips. These companies also carried out the assembly and testing of their own chips. As with most technology-intensive industries, the silicon manufacturing process presents high barriers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cypress Semiconductor
Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoC programmable system-on-chip solutions, analog and PMIC Power Management ICs, CapSense capacitive touch-sensing controllers, Wireless BLE Bluetooth Low-Energy and USB connectivity solutions. Its headquarters were in San Jose, California, with operations in the United States, Ireland, India and the Philippines. In April 2016, Cypress Semiconductors announced the acquisition of Broadcom’s Wireless Internet of Things Business. The deal was closed in July 2016. In June 2019, Infineon Technologies announced it would acquire Cypress for $9.4 billion. The deal closed in April 2020, making Infineon one of the world's top 10 semiconductor manufacturers. Some of its main competitors included Microchip Technology, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas Electronics and Micron Technology. History Founding and early years It was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shadow Memory
In computing, shadow memory is a technique used to track and store information on computer memory used by a program during its execution. Shadow memory consists of shadow bytes that map to individual bits or one or more bytes in main memory. These shadow bytes are typically invisible to the original program and are used to record information about the original piece of data. Technique The technique is utilized by memory-error checkers that can store information on which parts of memory have been allocated to the program being checked. This shadow memory is then used for detecting and reporting incorrect accesses of memory, even though the program may not be crashing due to a segmentation fault or similar. An error checker may also store additional information on memory such as which bits have been defined and which ones do not. Memcheck, part of the Valgrind suite, uses this to detect undefined behavior resulting from acting on or printing undefined memory values. Use of shadow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
