April 2017 - Page 3 of 11 - Semiconductor Engineering


Blog Review: April 26


Cadence's Paul McLellan provides an introduction to single-event effects and the challenges created when high-energy neutrons bombard chips. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi looks at the strange turf war between two worms battling for control of IoT security cameras. Mentor's Ayan Pahwa contends that it's the duty of IoT device developers to take security as paramount factor and provide good secur... » read more

Prototyping ARM Cortex-A Processors Using FPGA Platforms


With the increasing cost and complexity involved in new SoC (System-on-Chip) designs, FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) prototyping is becoming an increasingly important, or even crucial, part of new SoC projects. By offering a way to get to hardware sooner, FPGA prototyping allows hardware verification and software work to begin earlier, before first silicon, effectively pipelining the desi... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 25


Making strange hadrons CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has produced and observed what it says are the world’s first sub-atomic particles called strange hadrons. Strange hadrons are well-known sub-atomic particles with names such as Kaon, Lambda, Xi and Omega, according to CERN. Strange hadrons have never been observed until now. The observation could shed light on su... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 25


Thermal diode Engineers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed a nano-thermal-mechanical device, or thermal diode, which uses heat as an alternative energy source that would allow computing at ultra-high temperatures. "If you think about it, whatever you do with electricity you should (also) be able to do with heat, because they are similar in many ways," said Sidy Ndao, assistan... » read more

System Bits: April 25


Graphene used as copy machine for cheaper semiconductor wafers MIT researchers reminded that in 2016, annual global semiconductor sales reached their highest-ever point, at $339 billion worldwide while in that same year the semiconductor industry spent about $7.2 billion worldwide on wafers. Now, a technique developed by MIT engineers may vastly reduce the overall cost of that wafer technology... » read more

Enabling Magnetic Tunnel Junctions Array Processing For Embedded STT MRAM


The semiconductor industry is entering a new era of next-generation memory technologies, with several major inflections taking shape. Among these is the emergence of Magnetic RAM (MRAM). Over several posts, I’ll provide background on what is driving the adoption of MRAM, highlight some of the initial challenges and discuss progress on making STT MRAM commerically viable. Today, a typical m... » read more

22nm Process War Begins


Many foundry customers at the 28nm node and above are developing new chips and are exploring the idea of migrating to 16nm/14nm and beyond. But for the most part, those companies are stuck because they can’t afford the soaring IC design costs at advanced nodes. Seeking to satisfy a potential gap in the market, [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], [getentity id="22846" e_name="... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tool vendors In the wafer fab equipment (WFE) rankings, Applied Materials was the leader in terms of market share in 2016, according to Gartner. For WFE, Lam Research jumped from fourth place in 2015 to second place in the rankings in 2016, according to Gartner. ASML was third, followed by TEL. Meanwhile, VLSI Research recently released its ranking for both front-end and backend equipment.... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Finance August Home (formerly known as Kease), a San Francisco-based supplier of smart door locks and doorbell cameras, reports raising about $17.7 million from venture capitalists, with plans to lock down just shy of $25 million in private funding. The information was disclosed in a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Protocols Comcast has joined the LoRa Alliance a... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor unveiled new formal-based technologies in the Questa Verification Solution. It offers formal-based RTL-to-RTL equivalence checking flows optimized for verification of manual low-power clock gating, bug fix and ECO validation, and ISO 26262 safety mechanism verification, which the company says which can reduce verification turnaround time by 10X. The app also offers expanded cloc... » read more

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