July 2015 - Page 6 of 11 - Semiconductor Engineering


The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Semicon West is always a busy week. Typically, there are a plethora of events going on during the week. It’s also a good week to get a pulse on the industry. The good news: Innovation is alive and well. Bad news: Intel cut its CapEx. And tool makers are in the midst of a lull right now, with a cloudy outlook projected for 2016. Some even see a dreaded downturn next year. Pacific Crest Secu... » read more

Remembering Gary Smith


The EDA industry recently said farewell to one of its biggest advocates, Gary Smith, who passed away on July 3. Writing a remembrance for an industry acquaintance can be uncomfortable; writing one for someone who was a friend is just, plain painful. While I had a number of years writing about technology under my belt, by the time I started covering EDA for Electronic Business in 1997 I k... » read more

Speeding Up Analog


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss analog design and how to speed up analog circuits with Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris; Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta; Wilbur Luo, senior group director, product management for custom IC and PCB at Cadence; Brad Hoskins, director, IC design, microcontrollers at Freescale; and Jeff Miller, product manager at Tanner EDA. What foll... » read more

Blog Review: July 15


From 7nm to steel that's stronger than steel, there have been a wave of breakthrough announcements this week. Ansys' Bill Vandermark rounds them up in his top five engineering articles. In his latest installments of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster focuses on the growing complexity of ASIC/IC designs and the changes in resource use that resulted. In a new vide... » read more

A Broad, Effective Approach to Optimizing for Power


As an industry we talk a lot about the challenges of power-aware design and accompanying issues at leading-edge nodes. There’s no denying some tough challenges, but if we’re honest, there are plenty of opportunities we can exploit right now to improve power in our designs. You’ve heard the saying, “death by a thousand cuts?” Well, when it comes to grappling with power in today’s ... » read more

Power Breaks Everything


The emphasis on lowering power in everything from wearable electronics to data centers is turning into a perfect storm for the semiconductor ecosystem. Existing methodologies need to be fixed, techniques need to be improved, and expectations need to be adjusted. And even then the problems won't go away. In the past, most issues involving power—notably current leakage, physical effects such... » read more

Tsinghua Makes $23B Bid For Micron


In what would likely be the largest takeover of a U.S. company by a Chinese firm, China's state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup has put in a bid to buy memory giant Micron Technology for $21 a share or $23 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal is expected to be receive high scrutiny. Tsinghua Unigroup is the largest state-owned chip design company in China, according to Henry Guo, ... » read more

Molecular Imprints becomes a virtual reality company


Molecular Imprints was the venture funded imprint equipment start up, that was split up last year when the semiconductor applications were acquired by Canon. Sources tell me that the remaining non-semiconductor portion Molecular Imprints has been acquired by Magic Leap, a virtual reality start up that raised $542M last year in a B round led by Google. Magic Leap has developed a proprietary... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 14


Photo-doping semiconductors Scientists at Michigan State University found that by shooting an ultrafast laser pulse into a semiconducting material, its properties would change as if it had been chemically doped, in a process known as photo-doping. "The material we studied is an unconventional semiconductor made of alternating atomically thin layers of metals and insulators," said Chong-Yu... » read more

System Bits: July 14


Missing magnetism of plutonium found In a discovery by two national labs that could hold great promise for materials, energy and computing applications, plutonium’s magnetism has been confirmed, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. According to Oak Ridge National Lab and Los Alamos National Lab, plutonium was first produced in 1940. Its ... » read more

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