The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools Applied Materials has officially rolled out the Producer Selectra system, a selective etch tool. The system falls under the loosely defined category called atomic layer etch (ALE). Applied’s technology addresses a number of challenges. Today’s advanced chips have complex structures. They may also have deep and narrow trenches. One of the challenges is the inability of wet ... » read more

Blog Review: June 29


Ansys' Justin Nescott checks out the world's first electric highway for trucking in this week's top five tech picks. Plus, some cool houses, Boston Dynamics' giraffe-bot, and a drum kit in a backpack. Applied's Matt Cogorno takes a look at the challenges facing etch methods as devices keep getting smaller. Synopsys' Apoorva Mathur digs into the energy efficient aspects of the MIPI M-PHY a... » read more

The Road To 5nm


There is strong likelihood that enough companies will move to 7nm to warrant the investment. How many will move forward to 5nm is far less certain. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is big-company consolidation. There are simply fewer customers left who can afford to build chips at the most advanced nodes. Intel bought Altera. Avago bought Broadcom. NXP bought Freescale. GlobalFoundrie... » read more

CPU, GPU, or FPGA?


Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080 gaming graphics card is a piece of work. Employing the company’s Pascal architecture and featuring chips made with a 16nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFET"] process, the GTX 1080’s GP104 graphics processing units boast 7.2 billion transistors, running at 1.6 GHz, and it can be overclocked to 1.733 GHz. The die size is 314 mm², 21% smaller than its GeForce ... » read more

Menta Embeds FPGA Programmability


What constitutes a startup can be a matter of the market segment you are going after and the type of product that you are building. Within [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"], we often think of the lifetime of a company being just a few years between when an opportunity is identified, to a product being built and getting the first few customers and then getting gobbled up by one of the big three. But ... » 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

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

Rethinking Processor Architectures


The semiconductor industry's obsession with clock speeds, cores and how many transistors fit on a piece of silicon may be nearing an end for real this time. The [getentity id="22048" comment="IEEE"] said it will develop the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specifi... » read more

Blog Review: April 27


In a video, Cadence's Chris Rowan looks at the future of neural networks, particularly the shift from cloud-based to embedded devices and what we can increasingly expect from them. Waiting for RTL? Mentor's Rich Edelman suggests a way to get tests that are missing some simple RTL running with a bit of SystemVerilog. Synopsys' Richard Solomon provides a primer on calculating the bandwidth ... » read more

Blog Review: April 13


A Lam Research staff writer discusses the transformational effects of NAND flash memory and looks at the challenges of the next step: building 3D NAND structures. With the recent reports of people lining up to preorder the Model 3, Tesla may seem like the hottest electric vehicle company right now. But Mentor's Andrew Macleod argues it may actually be BYD Auto, a Chinese company that that so... » read more

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