The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions ARM made two acquisitions related to Bluetooth radio: Wicentric, a Bluetooth Smart stack and profile provider, and Sunrise Micro Devices (SMD), a provider of sub-one volt Bluetooth radio IP. The IP of both companies will be integrated to form ARM's new low-power radio IP portfolio. Numbers EDA revenue grew 11.9% in Q4 2014 to $2.1 billion, a new record for th... » read more

Blog Review: April 15


How much memory do you need to look 13 billion years in the past? Rambus' Aharon Etengoff ponders the Square Kilometre Array's massive number of radio telescopes and what it means for computing. NXP's Martin Schoessler argues that for smart cities to work for their citizens, both technology companies and government entities will need a new mind-set. Reinventing the wheel is a good thing i... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 14


Monster waves of light The FOM Institute AMOLF has observed what researchers call monster waves of light. In this phenomenon, monster waves of light appear from nowhere and then disappear again. Researchers have shown that it is possible to influence the probability of this phenomenon. As a result, the technology could lead to faster telecommunication systems or more sensitive sensors, acco... » read more

System Bits: April 14


Antennas on a chip In what is being called the missing piece of the puzzle of electromagnetic theory, a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge have figured out one of the mysteries of electromagnetism, that they believe could allow the design of antennas small enough to be integrated into a chip. These ultra-small antennas – the so-called ‘last frontier’ of semiconductor desi... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 14


Elastic energy harvesting Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Seoul National University collaborated to develop a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device. Their stretchable piezoelectric generator can harvest mechanical energy to produce a ~4V power output with around 250% elasticity and a durability over 104 cycles. The... » read more

EDA Sets New Record


EDA revenue grew 11.9% in Q4 2014 to $2.1 billion, a new record for the industry, propelled by strong growth in both IP and physical design. On a sequential basis, that represented a 15.1% increase, while on a year-over-year basis it was 11.9%. The four-quarter moving average, which takes into account quarterly aberrations, showed a 7.3% increase. "The semiconductor industry had a strong ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Intel is quietly delaying its process ramp at the 10nm node, according to multiple sources. In an e-mail, a spokesman for Intel said: “We have not disclosed a schedule for our 10nm process and we won't engage in speculation about it.” In March, though, Intel was supposed to make fab tool buys for high-volume manufacturing at 10nm, sources said. But now, those purchases won’t happen... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Certifications TSMC certified a number of tools for its current 10nm FinFET design rules and SPICE models and 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) V1.0 process, including: Ansys' power integrity and electromigration tools; Cadence's custom/analog and digital implementation and signoff tools; Mentor Graphics' physical verification, design for manufacturing, and circuit verification tools; and Synopsys' ful... » read more

Blog Review: April 8


No other human endeavor has seen such sustained exponential growth. But it's the end of an era for Moore's Law, says Cadence's Axel Scherer—and only the beginning of one for Moore's Law 2.0. Synopsys' Amit Sharma tackles the cache coherency extensions of the ARM Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) and points out that the infrastructure required for their verification needs to scale up in s... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 7


Liquid metal for Terminator robots The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University have devised a robot-like, self-fueled liquid metal mollusk. The liquid metal alloy within the system can move by itself and change form like the shape-shifting T-1000 robot in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The system consists of a liquid metal motor. The liquid metal is a mix of gallium, i... » read more

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