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At the TSMC 2010 Executive Forum, Yoji Hino from Fujitsu talked about the company's move to a fab-lite operation with the shift to 28nm. Although the Japanese company has its own fabs able to turn out 40nm devices, it will use TSMC for 28nm production.

One issue that Hino covered was the impact that the I/O ring has on device scaling from 40nm to 28nm. Unless you stuff the device full of transistors the I/O ring on wirebond devices can quickly dominate the cost because the pads don't scale anywhere near as fast as SRAM cells and logic gates. Analogue also generally doesn't benefit that much from scaling, except in terms of switching speed.

Hino presented a chart that showed good scaling from 65nm to 40nm for a device with 20 million gates of logic and 15Mbit of SRAM plus some analogue. On a 65nm process, this measures 10.1mm on a side. On a 40nm process, the dimensions reduce to 7.3mm on a side, a reduction of 48 per cent. However, the increasing dominance of the I/O ring and the analogue means that the 28nm device sees a slightly smaller reduction in area: 41 per cent for a chip that is 5.6mm on a side.

To stop the I/O ring from being too much of a burden, Fujitsu and Toshiba are cutting the pad pitch from 25µm to 22.5µm for staggered pins. The single-row pitch will drop from 40µm to 35µm. As smaller devices on 40nm could benefit from a reduction in I/O pitch, the older process will, apparently, also have the smaller staggered-pin dimensions from the end of the year, when 28nm is supposed to go live. The single-row pitch on 40nm will remain unchanged, presumably on the assumption that if a device is only using a single row of pins around the edge, it's hardly going to be pad-limited.

DRAM and flash-memory maker Micron Technology has swooped on Numonyx, the joint venture between Intel, STMicroelectronics and private-equity firm Francisco Partners in a deal worth $1.27bn in what may be a series of acquisitions in the resurgent but cash-strapped memory business.

Micron will pay using shares – there is no cash in this deal. "We are not leveraging the balance sheet to do this acquisition," boasted Micron CEO Steve Appleton in a conference call with analysts last night, shortly after all the parties to the deal managed to reach an agreement. Appleton apologised for the lateness of the call but said he wanted to get the news out as quickly as possible. "It is a really solid way to add to the company in a variety of ways."

David Srodzinski, CEO and founder of Scottish fabless semiconductor house Elonics, is preparing for a busy first quarter. Not because, after a devastating slump, the recovery in the chip business got underway halfway through 2009 but because Q1 is the coming-out season for new silicon. If you are not ready to get chips in front of potential buyers by the end of March, you can pretty much kiss goodbye to business in the second half of the year.

It’s a testament to the rise of consumer electronics as a proportion of the overall semiconductor business that the market is now so seasonal. “Q1 is the decision time for companies developing new products,” Srodzinski explained. “That is when they are going to be looking at new components.”

Making the selection in Q1 gives the companies approximately six months to get a new system into the market – in time for Christmas and the Chinese New Year in the following Q1. “Christmas drives the cyclical nature of the industry,” he said. “Miss the Q1 slot and you miss the market for that product completely. After that, they will be concentrating on the actual design. You are in with a small chance during Q2 but you won’t get into production with anyone in Q3.”

“We are focused on RF semiconductors, initially on the broadcast TV and radio space. We are concentrating very much on high-end RF,” said Srodzinski.

Formed in 2003, the company is aiming for the time when radios go soft: using signal processing to let the same receiver module deal with practically any frequency, possibly as far as 10GHz. “We believe that every radio will be made configurable. And we believe that the receiver can be pushed all the way up there,” he added. “But that’s a big challenge for a start-up to take on. We needed to focus the company as we go to a higher revenue stage. So, we are initially focused on the TV tuner market.”