Blog Review: Nov. 13


Applied Materials' Buvna Ayyagari-Sangamalli argues that the siloed structure that produced the computing eras of the past will not be sufficient to fuel the AI era and that a new codesign approach to everything from architecture to materials is needed. Arm's Wendy Elsasser examines emerging non-volatile memories and how they have triggered innovation for new memory protocols and optimized s... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers The IC industry once had several leading-edge vendors that invested and built new fabs. But over time, the field has narrowed due to soaring costs and a dwindling customer base. In 1994, the share of semiconductor industry capital spending held by the top five companies was 25%, according to IC Insights. This meant that a number of companies invested and built new fabs during the... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers China has created a new $29 billion fund to help advance its semiconductor sector, according to reports from Bloomberg and others. Here's another report. The The U.S. and China are in the midst of a trade war. This has prompted China to accelerate its efforts to become more self-sufficient in semiconductor design and production. This includes DRAMs as well as logic/foundry. -----... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 30


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the future of the automotive industry, the options for making the transition to autonomous driving, and how experience with electric vehicles influences perception of them. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls digs into the challenges of testing memory in an embedded system. A Synopsys writer looks at doubling bandwidth in PCIe 5.0, the PHY logical changes a... » read more

Power Semi Wars Begin


Several vendors are rolling out the next wave of power semiconductors based on gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC), setting the stage for a showdown against traditional silicon-based devices in the market. Power semiconductors are specialized transistors that incorporate different and competitive technologies like GaN, SiC and silicon. Power semis operate as a switch in high-volt... » read more

Making Random Variation Less Random


The economics for random variation are changing, particularly at advanced nodes and in complex packaging schemes. Random variation always will exist in semiconductor manufacturing processes, but much of what is called random has a traceable root cause. The reason it is classified as random is that it is expensive to track down all of the various quirks in a complex manufacturing process or i... » read more

A Quantum Future Approaches


By Kenichi Ohno, Robert Visser, and Nir Yahav We often think quantum technology is a far-off future. Thanks to decades-long research on the elemental technologies and recent breakthroughs, the emergence of quantum may happen sooner than later. Large enterprises, start-ups, government agencies and research organizations around the world are investing billions of dollars to scale quantum techn... » read more

Building An MRAM Array


MRAM is gaining traction in a variety of designs as a middle-level type of memory, but there are reasons why it took so long to bring this memory to market. A typical magnetoresistive RAM architecture is based on CoFeB magnetic layers, with an MgO tunneling barrier. The reference layer should have zero net magnetization to make sure that it doesn’t influence the orientation of the free lay... » read more

Are You Running Your Equipment Or Is Your Equipment Running You?


Applied Materials, the innovator of the SmartFactory Rx suite of software products, is taking the lead on leveraging Industry 4.0 principles and technologies, such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and advanced analytics, to optimize manufacturing process performance, asset utilization, and supply chain. SmartFactory Rx Analytics & Control (A&C) collects real-time data from interconnect... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 16


Arm's Greg Yeric dives into the challenges facing the semiconductor industry and potential solutions that could possibly have huge impacts toward the year 2030, from DNA self-assembly to new physics, in an adaptation of his wide-ranging Arm TechCon keynote. Cadence's Paul McLellan considers Google's recent quantum computing achievement, what quantum supremacy really means, and where it leave... » read more

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