The Mightier Microcontroller


Microcontrollers are becoming more complex, more powerful, and significantly more useful, but those improvements come with strings attached. While it's relatively straightforward to develop multi-core microcontroller (MCU) hardware with advanced power management features, it's much more difficult to write software for these chips because memory is limited. CPUs can use on-chip memory such as... » read more

Blog Review: May 25


As a prelude of drone delivery, shipping company DHL set up a carbon fiber tilt-rotor to ferry packages between two villages in the Alps, in this week's top five tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark. Plus, IBM's phase-change memory, see-through wood that's stronger than glass, and perhaps a Babel fish. There have been considerable investments in new memories, but getting to them won't be a... » read more

Executive Insight: K. Charles Janac


K. Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's changing in the automotive market, the impact of big data, and heterogeneous cache coherency. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What are the big changes you're seeing in semiconductor design? Janac: There are a lot of changes right now. Mobility is slowing down and b... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


The Internet of Things "doesn't just mean tiny devices," said Charlene Marini, vice president of segment marketing at ARM. "It needs a network." Speaking at the Mentor/ARM Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, she identified several key elements in her presentation, titled “Enabling the Ecosystem for the Backbone of IoT." Among them: Capacity and latency, scalability, agility, infrastruct... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Acquisitions ARM acquired embedded computer vision and imaging technology company [getentity id="22917" comment="Apical"] for $350 million in cash. According to ARM, the company's technology has been utilized in more than 1.5 billion smartphones and in about 300 million other consumer and industrial devices. Synopsys acquired [getentity id="22916" comment="Simpleware"], a provider of soft... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights released its top chip makers in terms of sales for the first quarter of 2016. The top-20 ranking includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and UMC) and six fabless companies. Intel remained in the top spot, followed in order by Samsung and TSMC. The biggest movers in the ranking were made by the new Broadcom (Avago/Broadcom) and Nvidia. Broadcom jumped f... » read more

ARM Buys Apical


[getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"] completed its acquisition of [getentity id="22917" comment="Apical Ltd."] for $350 million in cash. Apical provides embedded computer vision and imaging technology, which ARM said has been utilized in more than 1.5 billion smartphones and in about 300 million other consumer and industrial devices, such as digital still cameras, Internet protocol cameras, and... » read more

Blog Review: May 18


Lead-absorbing bots may be the future of cleaning up polluted industrial wastewater, in this week's top five tech picks from Ansys' Justin Nescott. Plus, the Hyperloop is getting closer, and two years of Curiosity. In his latest podcast, Synopsys' Robert Vamosi chats with Chris Clark about the current automotive security landscape and what gaps exist when it comes to standards. From an ED... » read more

Power-Centric Chip Architectures


As traditional scaling runs out of steam, new chip architectures are emerging with power as the starting point. While this trend has been unfolding for some time, it is getting an extra boost and sense of urgency as design teams weigh a growing number of design challenges and options across a variety of new markets. Among the options are [getkc id="196" kc_name="multi-patterning"] and [getkc... » read more

IP Business Models In Flux


EDA and IP suppliers are engaging with foundries earlier with each manufacturing process node, while those foundries are providing ever more optimized and tuned processes to their customers. As part of this, IP providers must port their IP offerings to the various foundries and processes, putting a squeeze on resources. That raises some difficult questions, such as how to prioritize their li... » read more

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