December 2016 - Page 4 of 11 - Semiconductor Engineering

Foundries See Mixed Future
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 1

Amid a tumultuous business environment, the silicon foundry industry is projected to see steady growth in a number of process segments in 2017. As in past years, the foundry market is expected to grow faster than the overall IC industry in 2017. But at the same time, the IC industry—the foundry customer base—continues to witness a frenetic wave of merger and acquisition activity. Basical... » read more

DO-254 Explained
By Cadence - 21 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

This white paper, the first in a series of DO-254-related white papers, will explore the high-level concepts and activities within the DO-254 Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware specification, why they exist, and what they mean. In this paper, we will explore the safety-related concepts of requirements traceability, design assurance levels, the overall DO-254-compliant fl... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 20
By Mark LaPedus - 20 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

3D printed wind instruments Autodesk Research and Dartmouth have developed a 3D printing technology that enables novel musical wind instruments in the form of animals, doughnuts and other shapes. With a 3D printer, researchers devised 16 free-form wind instruments in various shapes, such as a star, bunny, snowman, dragon, horse, pig, cat and sheep. There is even a way to make a doughnut in... » read more

Watch Out: Reality Is Set To Explode
By Adrienne Downey - 20 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

Walk into any store right now (December 2016), and you can probably find a VR headset for $20. These will be a popular gift item this holiday season, but ultimately it may hurt the market if consumers have bad experiences with these bargain-basement VR headsets. There exists a considerable amount of confusion regarding the virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality industries. Sem... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 20
By Ann Mutschler - 20 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

Removing quasiparticles from superconducting quantum circuits improves lifetime Given that an important prerequisite for the realization of high-performance quantum computers is that the stored data should remain intact for as long as possible, an international team of scientists at European interdisciplinary research institute Forschungszentrum Jülich has succeeded in making further improvem... » read more

U.S. Tax Reform
By SEMI - 20 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 1

By Jamie Gerard Although SEMI has been working on behalf of its members on reforming the U.S. business tax code for many years, the opportunity to see that change is becoming more likely than any time in the 21st century. President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have signaled that tax reform will be at the top of their agenda as the 115th congres... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 20
By Jesse Allen - 20 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

Stamping with electronic ink Engineers at MIT fabricated a stamp made from carbon nanotubes that is able to print electronic inks onto rigid and flexible surfaces. The team's stamping process should be able to print transistors small enough to control individual pixels in high-resolution displays and touchscreens, said A. John Hart, associate professor of contemporary technology and mecha... » read more

Green Computing: GPUs Strike Back
By Barry Pangrle - 19 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 1

After the last Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference in June, I wrote an article here about how the custom designed chips from NRCPC (used in the Sunway TaihuLight) and PEZY Computing (used in the PEZY Shoubu) had jumped to the top of the Green500 list with the Sunway TaihuLight also remarkably topping the Top500 list. Well, six months after the report from the IEEE/ACM SC16 Con... » read more

The Benefits Of Antifuse OTP
By Nick Chen - 19 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 3

One-time programmable (OTP) memory is a type of non-volatile memory (NVM) that commonly comprises of electrical fuse (eFuse) and antifuse. The advantages of OTP memory over multi-time programmable (MTP) memory, such as EEPROM or flash memory, are smaller area and no additional wafer processing steps. Therefore, for many low-cost applications, the OTP memory is used to replace the MTP memory. ... » read more

Uncertainty Grows For 5nm, 3nm
By Mark LaPedus - 19 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 4

As several chipmakers ramp up their 10nm finFET processes, with 7nm just around the corner, R&D has begun for 5nm and beyond. In fact, some are already moving full speed ahead in the arena. [getentity id="22586" comment="TSMC"] recently announced plans to build a new fab in Taiwan at a cost of $15.7 billion. The proposed fab is targeted to manufacture TSMC’s 5nm and 3nm processes, whic... » read more

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