Blog Review: Feb. 22


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster observes that the FPGA market continues to go through a similar complexity curve that the IC/ASIC market experienced in the early and mid-2000 timeframe. Synopsys' Mitch Heins explores the benefits of heterogeneous integration of lasers and active gain elements in a silicon-based photonic IC, including reduced system costs, size, weight, and power along with improv... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing & Test


The Biden Administration’s export bans for semiconductor manufacturing equipment are delaying expansion plans for Chinese chipmakers, Nikkei Asia reports. Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) has halted work on its second memory plant near Wuhan, and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CMTX) says its second production facility, slated to open in 2023, will be delayed until 2024 or 2025. In an effo... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


It’s earnings season. Arm, Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens (consolidated), Rambus, and Renesas reported quarterly results over the past couple weeks. All posted year-over-year revenue growth, despite an overall challenging macroeconomic climate. A roundup of all the chip industry earnings reports from the past several weeks can be found here. The edge computing market is projected to jump to al... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Tesla will recall 362,000 U.S. vehicles over Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that the cars sometimes have unsafe behavior around intersections when using the FSD Beta system. Examples are “traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 15


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines the relationship between verification maturity and non-trivial bug escapes into production, as well as whether safety critical development processes yield higher quality in terms of preventing bugs and achieving silicon success. Synopsys' Shankar Krishnamoorthy finds that the rapid progress of machine learning models is driving demand for more domain-speci... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Chips for consumer devices are down, but the overall chip industry is actively preparing for the next phase of growth. Worldwide silicon wafer shipments, which are an aggregate view of all the various semiconductor segments, hit an all-time high in 2022, increasing 4% to 14,713 million square inches (MSI). Wafer revenue, meanwhile, rose 9.5% to $13.8 billion over the same period, SEMI reported ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is heading for an IPO this year, with plans "fairly well developed and underway now," CEO Rene Haas told Reuters. Arm reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $746 million, up 28% compared with the same period in 2021, setting the stage for a public offering. The company noted it had double- or triple-revenue increases in automotive, consumer, infrastructure, and IoT. The Si2 Compact Model Coalit... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


General Motors (GM) made a deal with GlobalFoundries (GF) to have chips made at the U.S.-based foundry in upstate New York for GM’s key suppliers. GF will expand its production capabilities exclusively for GM’s supply chain, while GM promises to bring economies of scale through its strategy to reduce the unique types of chips needed in products. J.D. Power released its 2023 U.S. Vehicle ... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 8


Cadence's Sanjeet Kumar points to key changes and optimizations that are done for USB3 Gen T compared to USB3 Gen X tunneling in order to minimize tunnel overhead and maximize USB3 throughput. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster considers the effectiveness of IC and ASIC verification by looking at schedule overruns, number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs. Synopsys' Chris C... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Imec released its semiconductor roadmap, which calls for doubling compute power every six months to handle the data explosion and new data-intensive problems. Imec named five walls (scaling, memory, power, sustainability, cost) that need to be dismantled. The roadmap (below) stretches from 7nm to 0.2nm (2 angstroms) by 2036, and includes four generations of gate-all-around FETs followed by thre... » read more

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