Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. India approved the construction of two fabs and a packaging house, for a total investment of about $15.2 billion, according to multiple sources. One fab will be jointly owned by Tata and Taiwan's Powerchip. The second fab will be a joint investment between CG Power, Japan's Renesas Electronics, and Thailand's Stars Microelectronics. Tata will run t... » read more

Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

Improving Performance And Power With HBM3


HBM3 swings open the door to significantly faster data movement between memory and processors, reducing the power it takes to send and receive signals and boosting the performance of systems where high data throughput is required. But using this memory is expensive and complicated, and that likely will continue to be the case in the short term. High Bandwidth Memory 3 (HBM3) is the most rece... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Regional Shifts Supply chains are moving away from China. Apple, Honda, and Mazda are in line to diversify their manufacturing across different regions, according to one report. Another report says Apple plans to manufacture some of its new iPhone 14s in India. Mexico wants to be part of U.S.’s drive to move chip manufacturing closer to home, hosting American financiers to discuss elect... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Alphawave IP will acquire the OpenFive business unit from SiFive. The $210 million cash deal will bring OpenFive’s high-speed connectivity SoC IP portfolio to Alphawave and nearly double its IPs currently available, including an expanded die-to-die connectivity portfolio as well as adding data center and networking custom silicon solutions. "When we completed our IPO in 2021, we committed to ... » read more

Chiplets Enter The Supercomputer Race


Several entities from various nations are racing each other to deliver and deploy chiplet-based exascale supercomputers, a new class of systems that are 1,000x faster than today’s supercomputers. The latest exascale supercomputer CPU and GPU designs mix and match complex dies in advanced packages, adding a new level of flexibility and customization for supercomputers. For years, various na... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers China’s Tsinghua Unigroup is in trouble. The group is the parent company of China’s YMTC, a 3D NAND supplier, and other chip ventures. It is close to moving into bankruptcy proceedings. Now, a consortium led by Alibaba has emerged as the frontrunner to take over Tsinghua Unigroup, according to a report from Bloomberg. That deal would keep the company afloat, the report said. ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools Cadence's digital and custom/analog flows were certified for TSMC's N3 and N4 process technologies. Updates for the digital flow includes efficient processing of large libraries, additional accuracy during library cell characterization and static timing analysis, and support for accurate leakage calculation required in N3 and static power calculation for new N3 cells. Synopsys' digita... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

← Older posts