October 2017 - Semiconductor Engineering

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 31
By Mark LaPedus - 31 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Tiny jet engines The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has developed the world´s smallest jet engine. Samuel Sánchez, a researcher from the Stuttgart, Germany-based R&D organization, officially received the Guinness World Record certification for the smallest nanotube travelling through fluid. The technology makes use of propulsion, which resembles the characteristics of a ... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 31
By Ann Mutschler - 31 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Software enables cars to auto-report diagnostics Thanks to researchers at MIT, it may soon be possible to hop into a ride-share car, glance at a smartphone app, and tell the driver that the car’s left front tire needs air, its air filter should be replaced next week, and its engine needs two new spark plugs. [caption id="attachment_409967" align="alignnone" width="300"] A new smartphone a... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 31
By Jesse Allen - 31 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Battery material supplies Researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Rochester Institute of Technology conducted an analysis of whether there are enough raw materials to support increased lithium-ion battery production, expected to grow significantly due to electric vehicles and grid-connected battery systems. They conclude that while in the near future there shou... » read more

Technology For The Privileged
By Brian Bailey - 30 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 3

What happens when something grows quickly? It normally results in progress that is a little uncontrolled. There are no rules to govern it, there is no clearly defined end point, there is nothing that is absolute. That was the focus of the keynote given by Stacey Higginbotham at Arm TechCon. We can all see the good and the benefits that will come from progress, but we also get glimpses of wha... » read more

ADAS Design Shifts Toward Hardware
By Kurt Shuler - 30 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Autonomous driving will challenge system-level designers like never before with the simultaneous integration of three critical areas: Supercomputing complexity, real-time embedded performance, and functional safety. To get there, developers will need to shift their focus from a software-centric approach toward custom hardware development to produce a system that meets the safety, cost, and powe... » read more

How To Handle Concurrency
By Brian Bailey - 30 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 3

The evolution of processing architectures has solved many problems within a chip, but for each problem solved another one was created. Concurrency is one of those issues, and it has been getting much more attention lately. While concurrency is hardly a new problem, the complexity of today’s systems is making it increasingly difficult to properly design, implement and verify the software an... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing
By Mark LaPedus - 27 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers At this week’s International Wafer-Level Packaging Conference (IWLPC), Samsung disclosed details about its efforts in the panel-level fan-out market. Samsung as well as ASE, Nepes and others are developing a next-generation fan-out technology using a panel-level format. In panel-level fan-out packaging, you can put more die on a panel as compared to a traditional round wafer, w... » read more

The Week In Review: Design
By Jesse Allen - 27 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

M&A PLDA is divesting its Reflex CES brand. The FPGA board maker will become wholly managed by its own management and investment teams. In 2015, Reflex CES took over the hardware businesses of PLDA, including FPGA-based boards and the System-on-Module product lines. Tools Mentor uncorked a new tool for in-system test and diagnosis of automotive ICs. Tessent MissionMode provides infrast... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT
By Jeff Dorsch - 27 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Finance Automile, an Internet of Things company involved in field-service businesses, has received $34 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $47 million. Existing investors Dawn Capital, Point Nine Capital, SaaStr Fund, and Salesforce Ventures also participated in the new round. Automile will use the money on marketing, product developmen... » read more

Making Machine Learning Portable
By Ed Sperling - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Machine learning is everywhere, and it has exploded at a pace no one would have expected. Even a year ago, ML was more of an experiment than a reality. NVIDIA's stock price (Fig. 1, below) is a good representation of just how quickly this market has grown. GPUs are the chip of choice for training machine learning systems. Fig. 1: Nvidia 5-year stock price. Source: Google Finance Ma... » read more

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