Startup Funding: December 2021


Chinese startups dominated last month's fundraising, with companies from the country comprising about two-thirds of those covered in this report. In addition to the number of companies, startups from China also drew significant amounts of funding, with a display driver company and an EV battery maker each garnering around $1B and six more companies seeing rounds over $100M. Two particularly ... » read more

Domain-Specific Design Drives EDA Changes


The chip design ecosystem is beginning to pivot toward domain-specific architectures, setting off a scramble among tools vendors to simplify and optimize existing tools and methodologies. The move reflects a sharp slowdown in Moore's Law scaling as the best approach for improving performance and reducing power. In its place, chipmakers — which now includes systems companies — are pushing... » read more

Industry Transforming In Ways Previously Unimaginable


Early in the year, everyone expected that the availability of COVID vaccines would signal the start of a return to normal, but that has certainly not been the case. Now the industry is taking a longer-term view about how to transform business, what is necessary for people to maintain their mental health, and how to create robust hybrid work environments for the future that do not discard the po... » read more

Who Designs Medical ICs


The medical chip market is heating up as sensor and processing technologies reach maturity, seeing off a frenzy of activity by systems companies and startups looking to plant a stake in a vast and largely untapped arena. As with any industry, there are a variety of business models, which can spread out the design burden over many companies or just one large one. This was limited in the past ... » read more

2021 Top Tech Videos


While the world’s chip shortage dominated the 2021 headlines, the semiconductor industry blazed new trails with the increased electrification of cars, focused AI applications, improving power/performance, better utilization of data deluges, dealing with design challenges in advanced nodes and much more focus on chip security. Semiconductor Engineering’s Tech Talks reflected these focus a... » read more

Batteries Take Center Stage


For any mobile electronic device, the biggest limiting factors are the size, age, type, and utilization of the batteries. Battery technology is improving on multiple fronts. The batteries themselves are becoming more efficient. They are storing more energy per unit of area, and work is underway to provide faster charging and to increase the percentage of that energy that can be used, as well... » read more

Reliability Concerns Shift Left Into Chip Design


Demand for lower defect rates and higher yields is increasing, in part because chips are now being used for safety- and mission-critical applications, and in part because it's a way of offsetting rising design and manufacturing costs. What's changed is the new emphasis on solving these problems in the initial design. In the past, defectivity and yield were considered problems for the fab. Re... » read more

The High But Often Unnecessary Cost Of Coherence


Cache coherency, a common technique for improving performance in chips, is becoming less useful as general-purpose processors are supplemented with, and sometimes supplanted by, highly specialized accelerators and other processing elements. While cache coherency won't disappear anytime soon, it is increasingly being viewed as a luxury necessary to preserve a long-standing programming paradig... » read more

Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

Next Steps For Panel-Level Packaging


Tanja Braun, group manager at Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM), sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about III-V device packaging, chiplets, fan-out and panel-level processing. Fraunhofer IZM recently announced a new phase of its panel-level packaging consortium. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: IC packaging isn’t new, but years a... » read more

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