Ways To Address The Materials Crunch


Stellar growth over the last two years and the seemingly insatiable demand for chips, at least through 2025, is sparking massive investment by chip firms — as much as $500B over the next five years. But without significant boosts in raw materials, parts for tools, and silicon to fuel facilities, such numbers are unlikely to be met. Materials are the Achilles heel to the rapidly expanding c... » read more

Week in Review: Manufacturing, Test


Breaking the Logjam The U.S. government’s delay in funding strategic chip capacity is threatening supply chains that are critical to national security. In fact, classified meetings are being held this week on the subject. Meanwhile, recognizing that time is of the essence, a group of billionaires has backed the “America’s Frontier Fund,” a non-profit group that aims to spur U.S. chipma... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Edge, embedded, IoT Renesas Electronics will acquire Reality Analytics, Inc. (Reality AI), a provider of embedded AI and TinyML solutions for advanced non-visual sensing in automotive, industrial, and commercial products. The inference-based AI solutions can be implemented across various endpoint AI applications. “Customers are increasingly demanding highly customized solutions involving emb... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Lightyear, an automotive company based in the Netherlands, announced its solar car, the Lightyear 0, which goes into production this year. The car has a Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) range of 625 kilometers/388 miles and can charge itself while driving or parked, using double curved solar arrays on its roof. The daily charging adds 70 kilometers/... » read more

IP Industry Transformation


The design IP industry is developing an assortment of new options and licensing schemes that could affect everything from how semiconductor companies collaborate to how ICs are designed, packaged, and brought to market. The IP market already has witnessed a sweeping shift from a "design once, use everywhere" approach, to an "architect once, customize everywhere" model, in which IP is highly ... » read more

Startup Funding: May 2022


May was another strong month for China as it continues its push to build a native semiconductor ecosystem. Over half the month's total funding went to startups in the country. Over half the companies funded were from China as well, including two FPGA companies, three making CPUs, a GPU startup, and numerous networking and wireless chip companies. Two of those, in FPGAs and CPUs, raised rounds s... » read more

Week in Review: Manufacturing, Test


Hybrid Bonding & Supercomputers At this week’s ECTC conference, CEA-Leti and Intel presented an “optimized hybrid direct-bonding, self-assembly process," which they claim has the potential to increase alignment accuracy and speed up fab throughput by several thousand dies per hour. The approach uses capillary forces of a water droplet to align dies on a target wafer. “Commercial s... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools, IP, chips Synopsys unveiled a new data-visibility and machine intelligence-guided design optimization solution. DesignDash is complementary to the company's DSO.ai AI-driven design-space-optimization tool and provides a real-time, unified, 360-degree view of all design activities. It uses deep analytics and machine learning to extract and reveal actionable understanding from large amoun... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving car company, obtained a permit to charge for rides in San Francisco, according to a story in Reuters. The California Public Utilities Commission, the regulatory board that can approve permits, voted 4-0 to issue “the first Phase I Driverless Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Passenger Service Deployment permit in California to Cruise LLC to a... » read more

Who Benefits From Chiplets, And When


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss new packaging approaches and integration issues with Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of Siemens EDA; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager at Keysight; Simon Segars, advisor at Arm; and Aki Fujimura, chairman and CEO of D2S. This discussion was held in front of a... » read more

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