Startup Funding: October 2020


October 2020 was a big month for startups across the automotive space, with sizeable funding all around. Three startups based out of China brought in over $100M apiece for ADAS and autonomous driving, and a fourth U.S.-based startup saw $125M investment for simulating and testing autonomous driving systems. Two electric vehicle manufacturers also received $100M+ rounds. Collectively, the auto c... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A AMD will acquire Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock deal. "Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our data center business and enable us to pursue a broader customer base across more markets,” said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2021. The acquisition of the programmable logic giant will leave only a few purepla... » read more

A Renaissance For Semiconductors


Major shifts in semiconductors and end markets are driving what some are calling a renaissance in technology, but navigating this new, multi-faceted set of requirements may cause some structural changes for the chip industry as it becomes more difficult for a single company to do everything. For the past decade, the mobile phone industry has been the dominant driver for the semiconductor eco... » 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: Design, Low Power


M&A Microchip Technology acquired LegUp Computing, a provider of a high-level synthesis compiler that automatically generates high-performance FPGA hardware from software. The LegUp HLS tool will be used alongside Microchip’s VectorBlox Accelerator Software Design kit and VectorBlox Neural Networking IP generator to provide a complete front-end solution stack for C/C++ algorithm develope... » read more

Defect Challenges Grow For IC Packaging


Several vendors are ramping up new inspection equipment based on infrared, optical, and X-ray technologies in an effort to reduce defects in current and future IC packages. While all of these technologies are necessary, they also are complementary. No one tool can meet all defect inspection requirements. As a result, packaging vendors may need to buy more and different tools. For years, p... » read more

Smart Backend Assembly Factory For Industry 4.0


I recently spoke with Chan Pin CHONG, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Products and Solutions at Kulicke & Soffa, about how smart manufacturing is driving new production efficiencies in the semiconductor industry. During our conversation, he also provided practical steps for factory operators to follow in evaluating their smart manufacturing needs in order to ensure successfu... » read more

Reliability Over Time And Space


The demand for known good die is well understood as multi-chip packages are used in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, but that alone isn't sufficient. As chips are swapped in and out of packages to customize them for specific applications, it will be the entire module that needs to be verified, simulated and tested, and analyzed. This is more complicated than it sounds for s... » read more

AI Design In Korea


Like many in the semiconductor design businesses, Arteris IP is actively working with the Korean chip companies. This shouldn’t be a surprise. If a company is building an SoC of any reasonable size, it needs network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect for optimal QoS (bandwidth and latency regulation and system-level arbitration) and low routing congestion, even in application-centric designs such as ... » read more

One More Time: TOPS Do Not Predict Inference Throughput


Many times you’ll hear vendors talking about how many TOPS their chip has and imply that more TOPS means better inference performance. If you use TOPS to pick your AI inference chip, you will likely not be happy with what you get. Recently, Vivienne Sze, a professor at MIT, gave an excellent talk entitled “How to Evaluate Efficient Deep Neural Network Approaches.” Slides are also av... » read more

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