DAC Day One: EDA Through Different Glasses


DAC is back in Austin after being away for three years. The weather improved for our arrival after the bad thunderstorms of the past couple of weeks. The sun came out and started to heat everything up. With water still pooling around the place, it was somewhat humorous to see a bus pass with the slogan "Think about Austin without water." DAC starts, as it always has in my memory, with a pres... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Taiwan’s annual Computex trade show, celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, opened this week, and the Internet of Things is among the focus areas of the exhibition. Tsai Ing-wen, the new president of Taiwan, said at the opening ceremony, “The IoT era is coming strong. Taiwan must focus on the integration of hardware and software along with low-volume, high-variety manufacturing capabil... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Through a joint venture with the government of Chongqing, GlobalFoundries will take over an existing 200mm fab in China. Then, GlobalFoundries plans to retrofit the facility and turn it into a 300mm fab. The foundry vendor is transferring its 180nm and 130nm processes to the China fab. Meanwhile, TSMC, UMC and others are also building fabs in China. Samsung Electronics has begu... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics uncorked the latest version of its Catapult high-level synthesis platform, adding a formal-based C Property Checker tool to automatically identify and formally prove hard-to-find issues like uninitialized memory, divide by 0, and array bounds errors in the users' HLS C++/SystemC model. IP ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors. According to ARM, the g... » read more

Blog Review: June 1


You have probably heard a lot about Portable Stimulus recently. Mentor's Tom Fitzpatrick talks about one proposal that the standards group is considering and the overlap between it and the second proposal. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at 3D Xpoint and where it fits in the memory hierarchy. Synopsys' Anand Shirahatti, Mohd Adil Khan, and Jamshed Alum introduce scaled flow control c... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Tools Mentor Graphics rolled out a tester for thermal reliability of electric and hybrid vehicles during power cycling. The tester is the first of its kind. Deals Rambus signed a deal with Eurobank Poland for a cloud-based mobile payment system. The deal involves Secure Element in the Cloud software from Bell ID, which Rambus acquired in January. Eurobank Poland has more than 1 million cus... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools Thermo Fisher Scientific and FEI have announced that their boards of directors have unanimously approved Thermo Fisher’s acquisition of FEI for $107.50 per share in cash. The transaction represents a purchase price of approximately $4.2 billion. In a video, Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, recaps the emerging mask and lithography trends presented at the recent Photomask Ja... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys made a couple of announcements this week related to its TCAD business. First, they acquired Gold Standard Simulations, which clearly became a major factor in the release of a pre-wafer simulation solution to help semiconductor manufacturers reduce process node development time. The new solution aims to provide a comprehensive process, transistor and circui... » read more

Blog Review: May 25


As a prelude of drone delivery, shipping company DHL set up a carbon fiber tilt-rotor to ferry packages between two villages in the Alps, in this week's top five tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark. Plus, IBM's phase-change memory, see-through wood that's stronger than glass, and perhaps a Babel fish. There have been considerable investments in new memories, but getting to them won't be a... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


The Internet of Things "doesn't just mean tiny devices," said Charlene Marini, vice president of segment marketing at ARM. "It needs a network." Speaking at the Mentor/ARM Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, she identified several key elements in her presentation, titled “Enabling the Ecosystem for the Backbone of IoT." Among them: Capacity and latency, scalability, agility, infrastruct... » read more

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