Author's Latest Posts


IoT Security Ratings Needed


Concerns about security have been growing alongside adoption of the IoT, and it seems to be making some headway. This is good news, if it continues, because one of the biggest concerns about buying connected devices is that they can provide inroads into personal data. Data security has been a persistent annoyance for several years. Almost anyone who travels or shops at major department store... » read more

Software Modeling Goes Mainstream


Software modeling is finally beginning to catch on across a wide swath of chipmakers as they look beyond device scaling to improve performance, lower power, and ratchet up security. Software modeling in the semiconductor industry historically has been associated with hardware-software co-design, which has grown in fits and starts since the late 1990s. The largest chipmakers and systems compa... » read more

Rethinking Stats In Manufacturing Equipment


Consolidation, slower market growth due to increasing complexity, and extended lead times have prompted SEMI to drop its book-to-bill reports. Long considered the best way to assess the health of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment business, the industry organization now views the book-to-bill report as far less valuable than in the past. "At the leading edge, there are only a handf... » read more

BEOL Issues At 10nm And 7nm


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss problems with the back end of line at leading-edge nodes with Craig Child, senior manager and deputy director for [getentity id="22819" e_name="GlobalFoundries'"] advanced technology development integration unit; Paul Besser, senior technology director at [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"]; David Fried, CTO at [getentity id="22210" e_name... » read more

Sigasi: Cleaner VHDL And SystemVerilog


Hardware engineers always have looked at software tools and methodologies with a certain degree of envy. While the hardware side has embraced the discipline necessary to get products right prior to release, in large part because it's too expensive to fix an error in hardware, the tools and languages are generally clunkier and the methodologies are much more rigid. Like software, they have to in... » read more

Bidding War On H-1B Visas?


Good help is hard to find. It's about to get harder—and more expensive. The U.S. tech industry's solution until now has been to leverage expertise from around the world, drawing top graduates and entry-level professionals under the H-1B visa program. Last year, there were 85,000 H-1B visas issued, of which 20,000 are required to hold a U.S. master's degree or higher. There are some exce... » read more

Changing Direction In Chip Design


Andrzej Strojwas, chief technologist at PDF Solutions and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University—and the winner of this year's Phil Kaufman Award for distinguished contributions to EDA—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about device scaling, why the semiconductor industry will begin to fragment around new architectures and packaging, and ... » read more

What Can Go Wrong In Automotive


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss automotive engineering with Jinesh Jain, supervisor for advanced architectures in Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto; Raed Shatara, market development for automotive infotainment at [getentity id="22331" comment="STMicroelectronics"]; Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; ... » read more

Putting The Brakes On Consolidation


China's efforts to reduce its trade deficit by acquiring technology outside of its borders—particularly in the areas of process technology and memory—are hitting some snags. Any proposed acquisitions are being closely monitored by government agencies around the globe, and in many cases they have been quietly derailed. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is pa... » read more

Transferring Skills Getting Harder


Rising complexity in developing chips at advanced nodes, and an almost perpetual barrage of new engineering challenges at each new node, are making it more difficult for everyone involved to maintain consistent skill levels across a growing number of interrelated technologies. The result is that engineers are being forced to specialize, but when they work with other engineers with different ... » read more

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