category: Special Reports

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Big Changes Rock Global Smartphone Market
By Jeff Chappell - 09 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

It's not just consumers that are benefiting from the proliferation of low-cost mobile multiple-core processors. Chipmakers are reaping the benefits of the booming smartphone market in Asia and around the globe. In the multicore smartphone applications processor market Qualcomm. leads the way with its Snapdragon processors; it accounted for 43% of the market in the first half of this year, fo... » read more

Big Changes Rock Global Smartphone Market
By Jeff Chappell - 25 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

BANGKOK — One of the many draws for Western travelers here in Thailand and throughout much of Asia, including China, is the availability of cheap consumer electronics. Unfortunately many of these electronic goods — little-known off-brands mimicking better-known counterparts, or white-label devices being passed off as name-brand products to unsuspecting consumers — typically are technologi... » read more

Is There Light At The End Of Moore’s Tunnel
By Brian Bailey - 22 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 2

Electrons are slow, clumsy and quite easily distracted. They’re slow because it now takes a signal longer to cross a chip than the period of the clock signal. They often don’t travel in straight lines as they collide with other atoms. And electromagnetic interference between adjacent signals can mess with the information they are transferring. On the other hand, light has none of these p... » read more

Phosphors Turn Blue LED Lights White
By Katherine Derbyshire - 18 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

LEDs inherently produce monochromatic light. An excited electron decays back to the ground state, releasing its energy in the form of a photon. The wavelength of this photon is defined by the band structure of the semiconductors used to make the LED. While monochromatic light is fine for indicator lights, most display and general lighting applications use white light. Not only is white light... » read more

Tunnel FETs Emerge In Scaling Race
By Mark LaPedus - 14 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 2

Traditional CMOS scaling will continue for the foreseeable future, possibly to the 5nm node and perhaps beyond, according to many chipmakers. In fact, chipmakers already are plotting out a path toward the 5nm node, but needless to say, the industry faces a multitude of challenges along the road. Presently, the leading transistor candidates for 5nm are the usual suspects—III-V finFETs; gate... » read more

Huge Challenges With Billions Of Things
By Ed Sperling - 07 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

Communication is poised in the next couple of years to cross a line between humans and things—things talking directly to other things as well as to people—setting in motion a series of technological, social and legal issues that will take years or decades to resolve. On one hand, this is made possible by leaps in processing performance and power management in mobile devices. In his keyno... » read more

Buying And Selling EDA Companies
By Ed Sperling - 24 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

EDA, arguably more than any other industry, has been built on the backs of engineering breakthroughs by startups. In aggregate, those startups are the backbone of tools that have made cell phones smart and which helped improved gas mileage on automobiles. Through an almost continuous stream of acquisitions, these startups have added to the top-line valuation of big EDA companies, and despite th... » read more

Trending Back To ASICs
By Ann Mutschler - 24 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

True to its cyclical nature, the semiconductor industry is swinging back toward ASICs from more diversified approaches such as FPGAs. This dynamic is evident at companies such as Apple. “At one point we thought Apple was being a contrarian,” said Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics. “Everybody else on the systems side was shedding their silicon people. The easiest counterpoint to what Apple wa... » read more

TSVs: Welcome To The Era Of Probably Good Die
By Jeff Chappell - 21 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

Among the challenges of a widespread adoption of 3D ICs is how to test them, particularly when it comes to through-silicon vias (TSVs). While not necessarily presenting a roadblock, TSVs use in the mainstream will almost certainly change traditional test strategies. In fact for many chipmakers looking to stack their silicon, they may come to rely less on the traditional known good die (KGD) ... » read more

The Brave New World Of FinFETs
By Ed Sperling - 10 Oct, 2013 - Comments: 0

SoCs using 16nm and 14nm finFETs are expected to begin rolling out next year using a 20nm back-end-of-line process. While the initial performance and power numbers are looking very promising, the challenges of designing and building these complex chips are daunting—and there are more problems on the way. First, the good news. Initial results from foundries show a 150% improvement in perfor... » read more

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