Chip Industry In Rapid Transition


Wally Rhines, CEO Emeritus at Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about global economics, AI, the growing emphasis on customization, and the impact of security and higher abstraction levels. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where do you see the biggest changes happening across the chip industry? Rhines: 2018 was a hot year for fab... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 8


Measure twice, cut once University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center researchers are working with a robotic device that can perform laparoscopic surgery through a single incision, an operation that typically requires five or six small incisions. The device is called the SP Robot, developed by Intuitive Surgical. It features four arms that go into the body through a 1-inch incision. UT South... » read more

EDA, IP Show Strong Growth


EDA and IP revenue increased 6.7% worldwide in Q3 2018 to $2.44 billion, compared to $2.28 billion in the same period in 2017. The growth was fueled by rising investments in startups in AI and 5G, as well as a stampede of new and existing companies targeting automotive electrification and autonomous vehicles. While startup funding ultimately will run out as these new markets mature and cons... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm debuted two new image signal processors, Mali-C52 and Mali-C32. Both are capable of processing for high dynamic range (HDR), noise reduction, and color management at 4k resolution at 60fps. They can process 600 megapixels/sec. The Mali-C52 can be configured either for image quality or area for a range of applications, while the C32 is optimized for area and lower-power, cost-sensitive appli... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 2


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Uhnder CEO Manju Hegde explains the most critical issues impacting sensor development for autonomous vehicles and why new radar systems are needed to fill in the gaps. Synopsys' Fred Bals shares key points from the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation into the massive Equifax data breach that show how relatively small secu... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 2


Princeton plumbs blockchain technology Researchers at Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science are looking at how blockchain technology can provide secure financial transactions, among other applications. “Early on we realized this was a technology that was not well understood but that a lot of people were interested in,” says Ed Felten, the Robert E. Kahn Profess... » read more

Top Tech Talks Of 2018


2018 shaped up to be a year of transition and inflection, sometimes in the same design. There were new opportunities in automotive, continued difficulties in scaling, and an explosion in AI and machine learning everywhere. Traffic numbers on stories give a snapshot of the most current trends, but with videos those trends are even more apparent because of the time invested in watching those v... » read more

Week In Review: Design


Deals eSilicon teamed up with Sunflower Mission once again to present 59 university scholarships for engineering and technology students in Vietnam. Foxconn, the huge Taiwanese contract manufacturer (aka Hon Hai Precision Industry), already announced plans to build a chip plant in Zhuhai, outside of Hong Kong. Now it has developed plans to assemble high-end iPhones in India next year. What'... » read more

Making IP Friendlier


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP tracking and management with Ranjit Adhikary, vice president of marketing for ClioSoft; Jim Bruister, director digital systems (since retired) at Silvaco; Marc Greenberg, product marketing group director at Cadence; and Kelvin Low, vice president of marketing at Arm. What follows are excerpts from that conversation. Part one can be found here. ... » read more

Using Software Approaches In Hardware Verification


Agile methodologies, created to improve quality in software code, increasingly are being applied to hardware verification. This is less of a drastic shift than it might first appear. Developing a verification testbench is largely software, and similar methodologies can be used for reducing bugs in hardware. “A testbench is nothing more than a big software project, and it makes perfect s... » read more

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