FlatLight comments

I don't know why people keep insisting on the exchange rate with the dollar. It is very simple, the dollar has undergone a massive devaluation because the past and current monetary policy of the USA/Fed. There's nothing to expect from it anymore, the value of the dollar in terms of other currencies or gold has decreased and it will probably never recover again. It is hopeless. This is how the USA is making its debt bearable, by reducing the dollar value. At the same time, it makes a huge (and legal) salary cut (in real value) over all the American workers, which, in turn, helps their economy. So I guess, there won't be any Armageddon. However, the people who saved money in USA will see a huge decrease in value of their savings. The guys who enjoyed life and did not save at all, these guys won't loose anything. Life is unfair.

Good for Hitachi then.

Any productions become too expensive in Japan as yen value is too high. It it understandable that manufacturers would have to shift factories to foreign countries, but technology sections stay home.

I cannot see how the technology stays home if, for example, when a company start a factory in China, the Chinese government obliges the company to accept a member of the Communist Party to be a director at the same level as other directors (e.g. Finance, R&D, etc.). So, basically, someone needs to explain to me how a company like Hitachi can make sure there is no leak of core technology or intellectual property over time.

This trend of Japanese and Western companies moving to China is clearly a shortsighted strategy. Also, make no mistake, unlike in a number of democratic states, the Communist Party will never accept a foreign company to be leader in any segment of economy in China, never.

Who cares! I like people in real so when I get pinched I can smile.

You really want us to believe you are the girl on the picture? come on!

Well, perhaps Google cannot challenge Facebook alone, but an interesting start-up (Diaspora) is working hard to make social network a open standard. The question one should ask is, why can't people add contacts from other networks (e.g. Linkedin) onto their Facebook page. After all, you can send an e-mail from your yahoo account to a user of gmail, can't you? What if you could only send e-mails to yahoo users?? It would be insane, wouldn't it?

Here is their link: https://joindiaspora.com

Faster than IBM supercomputer?

Which one do you mean? And the answer is YES, it is faster than any supercomputer IBM has built to date.

Also, there is a big different here between "it achieves" and "it will achieve".

For once, we should be happy there is a piece of good news coming from Japan these days.

Yes, I think you missed the point of the original press release. You should not compare the results recently achieved by Toshiba with the performance of high-end spectrum analyzers made by Agilent, Tektronix, and the like.

You should be comparing Toshiba with Broadcom, Marvel, TI, etc. Those are the providers of wireless chipsets for mass markets. The companies you listed are just makers of high-end electronic equipment whose cost and power consumption are just not important at all.

A remember very well the nice features of GaAs based chips for high frequency applications. But they are not cost competitive for the mass market, which is supplied by silicon based devices.

Indeed, CMOS is still king in this field.

Reducing phase noise is basically a question of effort. Lets put it another way: finally Toshiba has improved his circuits, which were before lacking performance compared to competitors.

What kind of effort do you mean here? design time effort? Their concern is very simple: how to achieve low phase noise while reducing power and chip area. Design effort is just not important at all for such a mass production building block.

If you have been following the trend, as correctly pointed out in the press release, basically there is a shift from the analog PLL, using phase/frequency detectors, charge pump, and loop filter, towards all-digital designs. In the latter, time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are key building blocks. Apparently, I should go over the ISSCC paper to be sure, they have come up with a new TDC topology that performs considerably better than previously.

finally Toshiba has improved his circuits, which were before lacking performance compared to competitors.

Are you sure about this statement? Have you really looked at the phase noise, chip area and power figures?

banana republic?