The Week in Review: IoT


Investment The city of Dresden, Germany, is touting its prospects as a tech hub in the “Silicon Saxony” ecosystem, particularly for Internet of Things technology. Bosch, the German Aerospace Center, GlobalFoundries, Infineon Technologies, and other organizations are planning to invest about €4.5 billion (approximately $5.3 billion) over several years to develop processors, sensors, and 5... » read more

The 5G Design Dilemma


Nothing says low power and high performance like an emerging wireless standard that promises to increase link bandwidth, latency, and overall capacity by orders of magnitude while also reducing power. That emerging standard, of course, is 5G. With the number of devices that are projected to use 5G, it’s no surprise that 5G is a strategic initiative for many companies. This explains why des... » read more

Targeting And Tailoring eFPGAs


Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss what's changing in the embedded FPGA world, why new levels of customization are so important, and difficulty levels for implementing embedded programmability. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: There are numerous ways you can go about creating a chip these days, but many of the prot... » read more

Advanced Packaging’s Progress


Shim Il Kwon, CTO at STATS ChipPAC, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the current and future trends of chip packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) vendors provide third-party IC-packaging and test services. What are the big challenges for OSATs today? Shim: The OSAT market is very competitive, w... » read more

Managing Peak Power


Peak power is becoming a serious design constraint across chips and entire electronic systems as more functionality is added into end devices and the compute and switching infrastructure needed to support them. The issues are a direct result of growing complexity in designs, fixed or shrinking power budgets, and the need to process more data more quickly. In mobile devices, the addition of m... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Conferences Artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G wireless communications were the talk of this week’s Mobile World Congress Americas event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Interesting topics, to be sure, yet they were eclipsed by a panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon about a matter of life or death. At a program put together by 151 Advisors, one of the panel ses... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled an integrated memory design and verification tool, with environments for bitcell design, array and complier verification, and memory characterization. It utilizes existing simulation databases for multi-corner and Monte Carlo analysis, which the company says can lead to a 2X runtime improvement. Solido Design Automation uncorked PVTMC Verifier, which uses machine lear... » read more

A Chip For All Seasons


FPGAs are showing up in more designs and in more markets, and as they get included in more systems they are becoming much more complex. A decade ago, the key markets for [gettech id="31071" t_name="FPGAs"] were industrial, medical, automotive and aerospace. Those markets remain strong, but FPGAs also are playing a role in artificial intelligence, data centers, the [getkc id="76" kc_name="... » read more

The 200mm Equipment Scramble


An explosion in 200mm demand has set off a frenzied search for used semiconductor manufacturing equipment that can be used at older process nodes. The problem is there is not enough used equipment available, and not all of the new or expanding 200mm fabs can afford to pay the premium for refurbished or new equipment. This may sound like a straightforward supply and demand issue, but behind t... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Connectivity Longing for LightSquared? The once-bankrupt company that tried to build a network with satellite airwaves and traditional spectrum has been reborn as Ligado Networks, which wants to serve 5G and Industrial Internet of Things applications with a mobile data network, employing satellite communications and other resources. Its founder is Philip Falcone, who was the guiding force behi... » read more

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