ST-E Will Have FD-SOI Based U8540: 35% Lower Power, Much Higher Frequencies

There's a close relationship between process technology and performance/power consumption, and it's about to get even more important in mobile. We've already seen that with the transition to 40nm and we will see that shortly with the transition to 28nm. Today ST-E announced its upcoming U8540 will use fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) transistors to gain a performance and power advantage over the competition. As an example, AMD originally introduced SOI to its processors in the early 2000s as a way of decreasing power and increasing clock speeds. ST-E claims the move to FD-SOI will allow for much higher operating frequencies compared to the L8540, or much lower power at the same switching speed.

Integrated baseband clearly offers some advantages in the market, but a process technology advantage can be even more important...

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Google-Backed Corduro Promises Even Lower Mobile Payment Fees Than Square

Mobile payments are coming, and there are many paths being beaten to get them to our phones. Google-backed mobile payments startup Corduro launches this week with a combined mobile wallet/payments processor for Android and the iPhone (which will be available in the respective app stores later this week). Like Square, Corduro is primarily a way for merchants to take payments on mobile devices. But it has a few twists. One is pricing. In some cases, it can be up to 30 percent cheaper for merchants in processing fees than regular credit card transactions (and even beats Square slightly). If someone is paying with debit bank card with a Visa or Mastercard logo on it—these already make up more than half of all credit card transactions in the U.S.—Corduro then reroutes those payments over the cheaper debit networks similar to the ones that ATMs use. ]]>

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