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Research Bits: Oct. 10


Disposable water-activated battery Researchers at Empa developed a water-activated disposable paper battery that could be used in low-power, single-use disposable electronics such as smart labels for tracking objects, environmental sensors, and medical diagnostic devices. The battery is made of at least one cell measuring one centimeter squared and consisting of three inks printed onto a re... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2022


The onshoring and buildout of dozens of fabs, many costing tens of billions of dollars, is beginning to spill over into other areas that are critical for chip manufacturing. Materials, in particular, which often gets little attention outside of chip manufacturing, witnessed a big spike in September 2022. In fact, seven materials companies covered in this report made up more than a third of the ... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 5


Arm's Andrew Pickard chats with Georgia Tech's Azad Naeemi and Da Eun Shim about an effort to evaluate the benefit of new interconnect materials and wire geometry and determine their impacts at the microprocessor level. Synopsys' Shekhar Kapoor shares highlights from a recent panel exploring the promises, challenges, and realities of 3D IC technology, including the potential of 3D nanosystem... » read more

Research Bits: Oct. 4


2D electrode for ultra-thin semiconductors Researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Japan's National Institute for Materials Science, and Kunsan National University designed two-dimensional semiconductor-based electronic and logic devices, with electrical properties that can be selectively controlled through a new 2D electrode material, chlorine-doped tin diseleni... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 28


Cadence's Paul McLellan shares more highlights from the recent Hot Chips, including some very large chips and accelerators for AI and deep learning, new networks and switches, and mobile and edge processors. Synopsys' Marc Serughetti considers the different use cases for digital twins in automotive and how they can help determine the impact of software on verification, test, and validation a... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 21


Arm's Neil Burgess and Sangwon Ha explain why they've joined Intel and Nvidia in proposing a new 8-bit floating point specification to enable neural network models developed on one platform to be run on other platforms without encountering the overhead of having to convert the vast amounts of model data between formats while reducing task loss to a minimum. Synopsys' Manuel Mota examines ver... » read more

Research Bits: Sept. 20


Multi-mode memristors Researchers from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Empa built a new memristor that can operate in multiple modes and could potentially be used to mimic neurons in more applications. “There are different operation modes for memristors, and it is advantageous to be able to use all these modes depending on an artificial neural network’s architecture,” said R... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence unveiled a big data analytics infrastructure to unify massive data sets across all Cadence computational software. The Joint Enterprise Data and AI (JedAI) Platform aims to optimize multiple runs of multiple engines across an entire SoC design and verification flow. It combines data from its AI-driven Cerebrus implementation and Optimality system optimization solutions, along with the n... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 14


Synopsys' Godwin Maben, Piyush Sancheti, and Hany Elhak examine some of the top chip design considerations for medical devices and why they require careful analysis of power to reduce the number surgeries to replace batteries, reliability for devices that can be expected to last for ten years or more, and security to protect private medical data and prevent breaches. Siemens' Chris Spear exp... » read more

Startup Funding: Aug. 2022


Investors funneled $1.9 billion into startups last month. The total was down from the previous few months for companies tracked by Semiconductor Engineering, but still a strong showing for the chip industry and related technologies. By market segment, power devices were a bright spot in August's funding, with 12 companies receiving new financing rounds. A manufacturer of multilayer ceramic c... » read more

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