2009 Insight Award Winners
In the TechInsights tradition, every attempt is made to inspire those designers, engineers and builders who actually do the work of creating technology. To highlight this, a special awards ceremony was held recently in San Francisco. As many of you know, Semiconductor Insights has offered leading technology companies a chance to showcase their best efforts through the Insights Awards which have been handed out to deserving products for many years. As part of the larger TechInsights family, the SI Insight Awards are now presented along with the EETimes ACE Awards at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) organized by the TechInsights events team.
The Insight Awards is a year-long process whereby companies who feel their chips are worthy of recognition provide them to the Semiconductor Insights’ crack technology analysis team. After analyzing the performance, circuit architecture and manufacturing processes of the nominees, several sessions are held where the lead analysts present the case for the finalists in each category. The result of the intense analytical scrutiny and many heated debates is our list of winners for this year.
The Insight Award for Most Innovative DRAM technology was given to Micron for their 50nm 1Gb DDR2. If you want to learn more about this most advanced RAM, the best place to start is a great Carl Wintgens article on EETimes.
In a world dominated by iPods and portable media, the award for Most Innovative Non-Volatile Memory obviously holds special distinction (as well as well as contributing extra heat to the winners debates). This year’s very worthy recipient is Toshiba for their 43nm 16Gb NAND flash.
The third device category award in 2009 was presented for the Most Innovative Mobile Processor. The winner was Intel for the Atom processor. Who can argue? Intel devices power the lion’s share of netbooks, the hottest computing platform currently on the market. Not only that, but Intel is leading this charge with the most advanced logic process available today – its 45nm High-K metal gate technology.
And finally the award closest to my heart, for Most Innnovative Process Technology, went to IMFT for its 34nm, 32Gbit MLC, NAND Flash. Since this is an Intel-Micron JV, the Process Technology Award made it two each for both Intel and Micron. As SI’s GM, Emil Alexov pointed out at the ceremony, this is the first product beyond 40nm that we have analyzed. That’s quite a milestone, and it’s no surprise that it is was achieved through the collaboration of the likes of Intel and Micron.
For more a great roundup of ESC and the EETimes ACE Awards and the gala evening, your best bet is to go to see Junko Yoshida’s article on EETimes. The full list of winners is here and the photo gallery of the presentations is also available. The ACE presentations at ESC 09 included some special IEEE ACE honors as well. Please go to the excellent Spectrum Tech Talk blog to get their angle on the event.
So if you won for 2009, there’s no time to lose. Contact the awards coordinator (cystalc@semiconductor.com) to submit your best for 2010. If you didn’t win, our analysis team certainly did not minimize your accomplishments. There were many worthy finalists. Picking the winner was nothing close to easy. (If you read a previous post, you may have heard that it was a “long and sometimes arduous” process.) But if seeing your least favorite competitor receiving the championship trophy left a bad taste in your mouth, what better time is there to let us know why you deserve the crown in 2010?