"The global recession is forcing us to make this very difficult decision in order to bring our costs in line with the current expectations for significantly reduced revenues," said John Kispert, Spansion president and CEO. "This action was not undertaken lightly given its impact on our employees and their families. However, we have a responsibility to preserve the value of the enterprise as we pursue our goal of positioning Spansion for a recovery through a restructuring and/or sale."

Speaking of the 720BE processor, I have to say this little jewel is currently my favorite bang for the buck processor. I have had an absolute blast testing this processor and when overclocked, it truly takes on a "devil with a blue dress" persona. I highly suggest you take a serious look at this processor if you are in the market for an upgrade right now. Anyway, we will be back shortly with our first results and some additional details about the AM3 platform.

DAAMIT says it currently feeds from all three GDDR5 suppliers, although we've only seen Qimonda kit soldered to their babies. "We have two other suppliers for GDDR5 memory and they are Hynix and Samsung. Today they do supply us with devices and they are qualified on our SKUs. There is no concern from AMD on supply of GDDR5 going forward and we only expect things to improve as GDDR5 penetrates more markets." Said Cap'n Hook at DAAMIT HQ. No worries there then. Nvidia's spokesbunny was a bit more coy about the technology "Qimonda's announcement has no impact on NVIDIA's business. We work with multiple memory suppliers to ensure that we have sufficient supply for all our GPU needs."

-- Area of Nonplanar-FET SRAM Cell Cut by More Than 50%; Establishes Promising Approach for Future Technology Nodes --

2008 International Electron Devices Meeting

TOKYO & NEW YORK & SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO:6502), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced that they have together developed a Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cell that has an area of only 0.128 square micrometers (, the world’s smallest functional SRAM cell that makes use of fin-shaped Field Effect Transistors (FinFETs).

The cell, developed with a high-k/metal gate (HKMG) material, offers advantages over planar-FET cells for future technology generations. SRAM cells are circuit components in most systems-level, large-scale integrated circuits such as microprocessors, and smaller SRAM cells can help provide smaller, faster processors that consume less power. The technology was announced on December 16 in a technical paper presented at the 2008 International Electron Devices Meeting (http://www.his.com/~iedm/general/) in San Francisco, California.

To reduce the transistor size when SRAM cells are created using conventional planar transistors, IC manufacturers generally adjust properties by doping more impurities into the device area. However, this adjustment creates undesirable variability and deteriorates the SRAM stability. This issue is becoming critical, especially at the 22nm technology node and beyond. The use of FinFETs -- vertical transistors with fin-shaped undoped silicon channels -- is an alternative approach to allow SRAM cell size reduction with less characteristic variation.