The Week In Review: Manufacturing


NuFlare Technology wants to enter a new market. The e-beam giant and NGR are jointly collaborating on a development program for next-generation electron-beam wafer inspection and metrology. It’s unclear if NuFlare is developing a single- or multi-beam tool, however. Don’t look now, but a fab tool downturn could be on the horizon. This comes amid a slowdown in PCs, tablets and smartphone... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Tessera boosted its 2.5D and 3D-IC capabilities with the acquisition of Ziptronix. The $39 million cash purchase adds a low-temperature wafer bonding technology platform, which has been licensed to Sony for volume production of CMOS image sensors. Numbers Semico Research forecasts that the SoC market will approach $200 billion by 2019. According to its analysis, average die are... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 26


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg attended IDF and learned more about the newly announced Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory technology named Optane including initial ship dates and some implementation details. In concluding his analysis of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster reveals an unexpected finding about design size and respins. How do you keep your power grid from bein... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


SEMI released its book-to-bill report for the North American semiconductor industry. The ratio was 1.02 for the month of July, up from 0.98 in June and 0.99 in May. The ratio is a three-month moving average of bookings and billings, and for July the average hit $1.559 billion. That's the highest so far this year, and it's up 12.5% year over year. Brooks Automation acquired Contact Co.,... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Chips Rambus moved into the fabless market with the announcement that it is developing memory controller chips, expanding the company's business beyond just creating IP for the memory and security markets. Read Ed Sperling's full analysis. Standards Accellera updated the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI). The newest version of the standard, SCE-MI 2.3, expands the set o... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 19


Several of this week's top reads from Ansys' Justin Nescott sound like they're straight from the pages of sci-fi novels (and comic books). An MIT project is getting close to creating the Iron Man suit, one company plans to finally build a space elevator, and Los Angeles takes an innovative approach to fighting the California drought: 96 million black plastic balls. Smartphones are so yestery... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Sunit Rikhi, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel and general manager of Intel’s Custom Foundry unit, has retired. “I left Intel on a sabbatical in late March and ended my career with Intel on June 1,” Rikhi said in an e-mail. Now, Rikhi has started a new company. The company, called Reach for Infinity LLC, “is a management development company devoted to... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Summit Research reports on the proposed buyout of Micron by China's Tsinghua Unigroup. New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter urging the United States to block any potential sale of the Boise memory-chip maker to the group. Summit states the Tsinghua investment is more likely to be a stake in Micron that specifically forbids certain IP to be made available in order to protect national se... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 12


SIM cards are protected by AES-128, which is supposed to be virtually unbeatable by a brute-force attack. But there's still a weakness: Rambus' Aharon Etengoff reports on how a researcher at Jiao Tong University exploited side-channel attack techniques to crack the encryption codes protecting 3G and 4G SIM cards. After recent reports on compromised car security, auto makers are likely search... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


IC Insights released its top-20 chip rankings in terms of sales for the first half of 2015. Samsung’s growth rate in 2Q ‘15 put the company closer to catching Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker. IC Insights also showed how the top-20 rankings would have looked if the proposed Avago/Broadcom and NXP/Freescale mergers were in place. Avago/Broadcom would have been ranked 7th and NXP/Freesc... » read more

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