Startup Funding: September 2022


The onshoring and buildout of dozens of fabs, many costing tens of billions of dollars, is beginning to spill over into other areas that are critical for chip manufacturing. Materials, in particular, which often gets little attention outside of chip manufacturing, witnessed a big spike in September 2022. In fact, seven materials companies covered in this report made up more than a third of the ... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Verification Methodologies Evolve, But Slowly


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss digital twins and what is required to develop and verify new chips across a variety of industries, such as automotive and aerospace, with Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for Imperas Software; Mike Thompson, director of engineering for the verification task group at OpenHW; Paul Graykowski, technical marketing manager for Arteris IP; Shantanu ... » read more

DNA Edges Forward As Data Storage Option


At technology conferences back in 2015, scientist David Markowitz raised the idea that DNA could be adapted as a data storage material. The audience response wasn’t all he had hoped for. “They would laugh me off the podium,” Markowitz recalls, but without rancor. Facing skepticism comes with his job at IARPA, the research arm of the U.S. intelligence community. The agency anticipates f... » read more

Toward Domain-Specific EDA


More companies appear to be creating custom EDA tools, but it is not clear if this trend is accelerating and what it means for the mainstream EDA industry. Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. Change can come from new abstractions, new options for optimization, or new limitations that are imposed on a tool or flow. For example, the slowing of Moore's Law means that sufficient prog... » read more

Strengthening The Global Semi Supply Chain


Within the semiconductor ecosystem, there are a number of dynamics pointing to the need for new ways of partnering in more meaningful ways that bring resiliency to the global semiconductor supply chain. One of these is the move to bespoke silicon, stemming from a shift in the companies that create most SoCs today -- the hyperscalar cloud providers. These market leaders know their workloads so w... » read more

Can ML Help Verification? Maybe


Functional verification produces an enormous amount of data that could be used to train a machine learning system, but it's not always clear which data is useful or whether it can help. The challenge with ML is understanding when and where to use it, and how to integrate it with other tools and approaches. With a big enough hammer, it is tempting to call everything a nail, and just throwing ... » read more

Progress In Quantum Computing


A recent wave of quantum computing investment has given rise to claims of a quantum computing bubble, based on overly optimistic technological claims in a field area that experts say has yet to demonstrate any real utility. But executives on the industry’s front lines say quantum computing is indeed a commercially viable technology, albeit one that is at least several years away from overcomi... » read more

How Memory Design Optimizes System Performance


Exponential increases in data and demand for improved performance to process that data has spawned a variety of new approaches to processor design and packaging, but it also is driving big changes on the memory side. While the underlying technology still looks very familiar, the real shift is in the way those memories are connected to processing elements and various components within a syste... » read more

10 Questions: Handel Jones


Handel Jones, CEO of International Business Strategies and author of a new book, "When AI Rules The World," sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the growth and impact of AI. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What do you see as the impact of AI on semiconductors? Jones: The fact that you have a 5G smart phone is because of AI. Steve Jobs changed the smart... » read more

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