Good Vs. Bad Acquisitions

By Ed Sperling - 07 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

M&A activity is beginning to heat up across the semiconductor industry, fueled by high market caps, low interest rates, and a slew of startups with innovative technology and limited market reach. Some of these deals are gigantic, such as the pending acquisition of Arm by Nvidia, and the proposed purchase of Maxim Integrated by Analog Devices. Others are more modest, such as Arteris IP's ... » read more

Israel: Startup Powerhouse

By Ed Sperling - 05 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Israel is at the front of pack with China and the United States when it comes to tech startups. But when it comes to large, indigenous tech giants, the country is nowhere to be seen. Virtually every major semiconductor company does business in Israel, and many have a strong presence there through centers of excellence or companies they have acquired. But after decades of innovation ranging f... » read more

Cerfe Labs: Spin-On Memory

By Ed Sperling - 05 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Arm has spun off one of its more intriguing semiconductor research projects, a new non-volatile memory type called correlated electron materials RAM (CeRAM) that holds the potential to substantially reduce the cost of memory in everything from edge devices to high-performance computing. Headed by two former Arm Research insiders — Eric Hennenhoefer, who will serve as CEO and Greg Yeric, wh... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2020

By Jesse Allen - 01 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

It was a good month for startups, with big rounds in automotive, data centers, and AI. A new startup with big backing is taking aim at energy inefficiency in the data center, and another is looking to make the industrial IoT battery-free. SK Hynix founded a new company to analyze semiconductor manufacturing data, and one of China's EV companies sees a massive cash infusion. This month, we look ... » read more

Security At The Edge

By Ed Sperling And Susan Rambo - 29 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security at the edge with Steven Woo, vice president of enterprise solutions technology and distinguished inventor at Rambus, Kris Ardis, executive director at Maxim Integrated; and Steve Roddy, vice president of Arm's Products Learning Group. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussion, click here. Part two i... » read more

Deals That Change The Chip Industry

By Ed Sperling - 28 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Nvidia's pending $40 billion acquisition of Arm is expected to have a big impact on the chip world, but it will take years before the effects of this deal are fully understood. More such deals are expected over the next couple of years due to several factors — there is a fresh supply of startups with innovative technology, interest rates are low, and market caps and stock prices of buyers ... » read more

New Uses For Assertions

By Ann Mutschler - 24 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Assertions have been a staple in formal verification for years. Now they are being examined to see what else they can be used for, and the list is growing. Traditionally, design and verification engineers have used assertions in specific ways. First, there are assertions for formal verification, which are used by designers to show when something is wrong. Those assertions help to pinpoint wh... » read more

Neural Networks Without Matrix Math

By Katherine Derbyshire - 17 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

The challenge of speeding up AI systems typically means adding more processing elements and pruning the algorithms, but those approaches aren't the only path forward. Almost all commercial machine learning applications depend on artificial neural networks, which are trained using large datasets with a back-propagation algorithm. The network first analyzes a training example, typically assign... » read more

Custom Designs, Custom Problems

By Ed Sperling - 16 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power optimization with Oliver King, CTO at Moortec; João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys; Dino Toffolon, senior vice president of engineering at Synopsys; Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Kiran Burli, senior director of marketing for Arm's Physical Design Group; Kam Kittrell, senior product management group d... » read more

AI Inference Acceleration

By Ed Sperling - 14 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about considerations in choosing an AI inference accelerator, how that fits in with other processing elements on a chip, what tradeoffs are involved with reducing latency, and what considerations are the most important. » read more

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