Trump Blocks Broadcom Bid for Qualcomm


President Trump has blocked Broadcom’s unsolicited, $117 billion takeover bid for Qualcomm, citing national security concerns. The president acted on the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which cited the possibility of Qualcomm’s chip technology being compromised by Chinese interests, if it were acquired by Singapore-based Broadcom. The move is t... » read more

Why Inductance Is Good for Area, Power and Performance


By Magdy Abadir and Yehea Ismail For chips designed at advanced technology nodes, interconnect is the dominant contributor towards delay, power consumption, and reliability. Major interconnects such as clock trees, power distribution networks and wide buses play a significant role in chip failure mechanisms such as jitter, noise coupling, power distribution droops, and electro-migration. ... » read more

Multiphysics Reliability Signoff For Next-Gen Auto Electronics Systems


The automotive industry is in the midst of a sea change. Growing market needs for electrification, connectivity on the go, advanced driver assistance systems, and ultimately the goal of autonomous driving, are creating newer requirements and greater challenges. A chassis on four wheels is now fitted with cameras, radar and other sensors, which will be the eyes of the driverless car, as well as ... » read more

LiDAR Goes Back To The Future


LiDAR is emerging as an increasingly important piece of the enabling technology in autonomous driving, along with advanced computer vision and radar sensor chips. But LiDAR systems also are finding their way into a variety of other applications, such as industrial automation, including robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Advanced mapping is another rapidly growing market for LiDAR, which... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers and OEMs After more than four years as chief executive of GlobalFoundries, Sanjay Jha will hand over the company’s top position to Thomas Caulfield, senior vice president and general manager at the foundry vendor. Caulfield, who joined GlobalFoundries in 2014, will become CEO. He has been running the company's fab in New York. "Jha intends to work closely with the company’s shar... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Toronto-based Ecobee, which markets smart thermostats, raised $61 million in its Series C funding, bringing the total funding for the 11-year-old company to $146 million. Energy Impact Partners led the new round and was joined by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Relay Ventures, and Thomvest. Ecobee counts Nest Labs, the Google subsidiary, as its chief rival. ThoughtWire, also headquartered in... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Microchip inked an agreement to acquire Microsemi, provider of chips for defense and aerospace, for $68.78 per share in cash. The acquisition price represents a total equity value of about $8.35 billion and a total enterprise value of about $10.15 billion, according to Microchip. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018. Silvaco acquired NanGate. Founded in 2004, ... » read more

Exponentials At The Edge


The age of portable communication has set off a scramble for devices that can achieve almost anything a desktop computer could handle even five years ago. But this is just the beginning. The big breakthrough with mobile devices was the ability to combine voice calls, text and eventually e-mail, providing the rudiments of a mobile office-all on a single charge of a battery that was light enou... » read more

Power Aware Intent And Structural Verification Of Low-Power Designs


Power aware static verification, more popularly known as PA-Static checks, is performed on designs that adopt certain power dissipation reduction techniques through the power intent or [gettech id="31044" t_name="UPF"]. The term static originates from verification tools and methodologies that applies a set of pre-defined power aware (PA) or multi-voltage (MV) rules based on the power requiremen... » read more

32GT/s PCI Express Design Considerations


Today’s networking and rapidly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications are requiring more bandwidth in accelerators and GPUs, as well as faster interconnects to transmit and receive greater amounts of data. Towards the middle of 2017 the PCI-SIG industry consortium announced its latest specification, PCIe 5.0, which raised the data rate from 16GT/s to 32GT/s and doubled the link... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →