Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade and government The U.S. continues to tighten its export controls for hi-tech, including a move to restrict fab technologies that enable 5nm chip production. The U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed controls on six more technologies, bringing the total to 37. They include: hybrid additive manufacturing/computer controlled tools; computational lithography software designed for EUV masks... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Synopsys added support for Infineon's automotive AI chip, the AURIX TC4xx 32-bit microcontroller with parallel processing unit. Dialog Semiconductor announced automotive qualification for its DA7280 high-definition haptic driver. The company Alps Alpine is using the DA7280 in Alps Alpine Heavy, the latest version of its HAPTIC Reactor Linear Resonant Actuators (LRAs). Bosch, M... » read more

AMD Wants An FPGA Company, Too


AMD signed a definitive agreement to acquire Xilinx for $35 billion in stock, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle against Intel in nearly all major markets. But there's more to this acquisition than just keeping up with AMD's arch-competitor. To begin with, the acquisition has a big impact on the programmable logic market. The only pure-play FPGA vendors left are Lattice, Achronix, a... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 27


Room-temp superconductivity Researchers at the University of Rochester, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Intel created a material with superconducting properties at room temperature, the first time this has been observed. The researchers combined hydrogen with carbon and sulfur to photochemically synthesize simple organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in a diamond anvil cell, which... » read more

Regaining The Edge In U.S. Chip Manufacturing


The United States is developing new strategies to prevent it from falling further behind Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps even China in semiconductor manufacturing, as trade tensions and national security concerns continue to grow. For years, the U.S. has been a leader in the development of new chip products like GPUs and microprocessors. But from a chip manufacturing standpoint, the U.S. is losin... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers AMD and Xilinx have entered into a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion. With the proposed deal, AMD will enter the FPGA business, putting it further in competition with Intel. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the AMD and Xilinx boards. The transaction is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2021. U... » read more

What’s Ahead For Chips & Equipment?


It’s been a topsy-turvy year in the semiconductor industry. 2020 was supposed to be a strong year. Then, the coronavirus outbreak hit. Countries implemented various measures to mitigate the outbreak, such as stay-at-home orders and store closures. Economic turmoil and job losses soon followed. Earlier in the year, the chip market looked bleak. Now, business appears to be strong. To gain... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Intel is exiting the NAND flash market. SK Hynix and Intel announced that they have signed an agreement on Oct. 20, under which SK Hynix would acquire Intel’s NAND memory and storage business for $9 billion.The transaction includes the NAND SSD business, the NAND component and wafer business, and the Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China. Intel will retain it... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence debuted System-Level Verification IP (System VIP), a suite of tools and libraries for automating SoC testbench assembly, bus and CPU traffic generation, cache-coherency validation, and system performance bottleneck analysis. Tests created using the System VIP solution are portable across Cadence simulation, emulation and prototyping engines and can also be extended to po... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security Intel announced new security features for its code-named Ice Lake CPU, according to a story in SecurityWeek. The 10nm-based Xeon Scalable will have SGX trusted execution environment and several new features for memory encryption, firmware resilience, and cryptographic performance acceleration. The new Total Memory Encryption (TME) feature in the CPU will encrypt access to memory. S... » read more

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