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Startup Funding: December 2022


The month of December saw six rounds of $100 million or more. The largest, at a massive half-billion dollars, will support manufacturing of 12-inch monocrystalline silicon polished wafers and epitaxial wafers in China. The company is aiming for a production rate of 1 million pieces a month when current expansion is completed. Also in the half-billion club last month is a company making auton... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 3


Printing electronics on curved surfaces Researchers from North Carolina State University have demonstrated a new technique for directly printing electronic circuits onto curved and corrugated surfaces. They have used the technique to create prototype “smart” contact lenses, pressure-sensitive latex gloves, and transparent electrodes. “There are many existing techniques for creating pr... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 20


Synopsys' Twan Korthorst explains how PDKs can help accelerate the photonic IC design process by offering building blocks such as several types of waveguides, passive devices like splitters, combiners, and filters, along with active devices such as phase shifters, detectors, semiconductor optical amplifiers, and lasers. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines IC and ASIC design trends, including... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Power always has been a function of cost. The more power required, the more it costs to run a device, both in dollars and carbon footprint. This makes the breakthrough in fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory all the more noteworthy, and one that could have significant implications for the future of computing, from data centers to rechargeable batteries in automobiles, robot... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 14


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out design and verification language adoption trends in FPGA projects, including testbench methodologies and assertion languages. Cadence's Veena Parthan finds that giving electric vehicle batteries a second life as energy storage devices can extend their useful life by 5 to 8 years, but a lack of standardization in EV batteries poses challenges. Synopsys... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 13


Electronic-photonic interface for data centers Engineers at Caltech and the University of Southampton integrated an electronic and photonic chip for high-speed communication in data centers. "There are more than 2,700 data centers in the U.S. and more than 8,000 worldwide, with towers of servers stacked on top of each other to manage the load of thousands of terabytes of data going in and o... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools, IP, design Codasip launched a new organization within the company to support the development and commercialization of technical innovations in key applications including security, functional safety, and AI/ML. "As semiconductor scaling is showing its limits, there is an obvious need for new ways of thinking. We will be working with universities, research institutes and strategic partner... » read more

Startup Funding: November 2022


November was a month for mega-rounds, with ten companies receiving investments of at least $100 million. One of those is a startup providing connectivity solutions for data centers and enabling use of the memory pooling functionality in the latest update to the CXL standard. Two quantum computer startups were part of the $100M+ club this month — one using very cold atoms to take on not only q... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 7


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster looks at the continual maturing of FPGA functional verification processes through increasing adoption of various simulation-based and formal verification techniques. Synopsys' Stewart Williams introduces the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) project and how it can make automotive software development, testing, virtual prototyping, and validation... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 5


Protonic programmable resistors for AI Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed an analog deep learning processor based on protonic programmable resistors arranged in an array. In the processor, increasing and decreasing the electrical conductance of protonic resistors enables analog machine learning. The conductance is controlled by the movement of protons... » read more

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