Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 30


SRC’s new R&D centers The Semiconductor Research Corp. has launched a network of research centers within its recently-announced Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP). SRC officially launched the 5-year, $200 million program on Jan. 1. With various research centers, the mission of JUMP is to lay the groundwork that extends the viability of Moore’s Law through 2040. The idea is... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 30


Lab-in-the-cloud Although Internet-connected smart devices have penetrated numerous industries and private homes, the technological phenomenon has left the research lab largely untouched, according to MIT researchers. Spreadsheets, individual software programs, and even pens and paper remain standard tools for recording and sharing data in academic and industry labs — until now. TetraScie... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 30


Wavy display architecture Researchers at KAUST developed a new transistor architecture for flexible ultrahigh resolution devices aimed at boosting the performance of the display circuitry. Flat-panel displays use thin-film transistors, acting as switches, to control the electric current that activates individual pixels consisting of LEDs or liquid crystals. A higher field-effect mobility of... » read more

Giant Auto Industry Disruption Ahead


The move to self-driving vehicles over the next decade or so will result in a massive restructuring of entire segments of the global economy that have evolved to create and support automobiles and the people who drive them. The shift will create many new jobs-particularly for semiconductors and electronic systems-and conservatively it will eliminate hundreds of thousands of existing ones. It... » read more

Babblelabs: Deep Learning Speech Processing


Pronounced “babble labs,” a startup that is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur [getperson id="11244" comment="Chris Rowen"] is setting out to transform speech processing and will leverage deep learning to do so. Rowen, CEO of Babblelabs, has spoken for some time about move of processing to more general purpose hardware, with applications layered on top, so it’s not so surprising his... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers The IC industry continues to consolidate. For example, Qualcomm has a proposed plan to buy NXP. And then, Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm. Who is next? In a research note, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves said: “According to Bloomberg, Microsemi is exploring a sale and we think logical acquirers could include Skyworks. We continue to view Microsemi as a notable strategic as... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Security Addressing the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities has not gone smoothly. Intel's firmware update caused unexpected behavior and a higher than expected number of reboots for its Haswell and Broadwell chips, leading the company to recommend users stop patching until an updated version of the patch is available. Microsoft's attempts to fix the issue left some W... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Hysolate, an endpoint cybersecurity startup, came out of stealth mode this week to announce receiving $8 million in private funding from Team8 and Innovation Endeavors. The Israeli company, which has an office in New York City, was founded by Tal Zamir and Dan Dinnar. Hysolate touts its hybrid endpoint architecture, which enables multiple operating systems to run side-by-side on a work... » read more

Hedging The Chip Industry


The chip industry has changed significantly since the last big downturn. And while there is no indication a downturn is on the horizon, analysts are beginning to ask questions about what comes next. Inventory is building at systems companies because of weaknesses in some of the key markets such as mobile phones and tablet computers, and there is a growing risk of trade wars due to recently impo... » read more

DVCon Committee Picks


A typical development team contains more verification engineers than design engineers, and that skew is getting wider. You can expect the trend to increase given that verification teams are now getting loaded with added complexity from heterogeneous multi-core systems, functional safety, neural networks and security-in addition to increasing size. Companies that do not keep up with the lates... » read more

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