Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Synopsys is joining Microsoft in the U.S. Department of Defense's Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) program to support the development of IC hardware and workflow prototypes that incorporate Synopsys' assured design and manufacturing flows into Microsoft Azure. The RAMP program aims to bring commercial capabilities and speed to the development of semiconductors fo... » read more

Longer Chip Lifecycles Increase Security Threat


The longer chips and electronic systems remain in use, the more they will need to be refreshed with software and firmware updates. That creates a whole new level of security risks, ranging from over-the-air intercepts to compromised supply chains. These problems have been escalating as more devices are connected to the Internet and to each other, but it's particularly worrisome when it invol... » read more

Bridging The Gap Between Smart Cities And Autonomous Vehicles


Smart city planners and carmakers are wrestling with similar problems and goals, but they are working at very different paces and often with different technologies — despite the fact that these two worlds will need to be bridged in order to be useful. Moving traffic optimally in urban areas is critical for reducing energy consumption and accidents, and for moving emergency vehicles through... » read more

Roaring ’20s For The Chip Industry


2020 was a good year for the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry that fuels it, but 2021 has the opportunity to be even better. New end application markets continue to open, and what were once seen as technical hurdles are leading to a multitude of innovative solutions, all of which need suitable tooling. No company can afford to invest everywhere, and so for EDA companies, their rel... » read more

Taming Non-Predictable Systems


How predictable are semiconductor systems? The industry aims to create predictable systems and yet when a carrot is dangled, offering the possibility of faster, cheaper, or some other gain, decision makers invariably decide that some degree of uncertainty is warranted. Understanding uncertainty is at least the first step to making informed decisions, but new tooling is required to assess the im... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling


In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Tesla has to recall 158,000 2012-2018 Model S and 2016-2018 Model X vehicles because of an eMMC NAND flash memory chip. The chip can cause the touchscreen to stop working when the memory reaches its limit of writes. According to a story in Reuters, the United States NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) is insisting on the recall because many of Tesla contr... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm will acquire data center chip startup Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia's technology would be incorpora... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


FPGA and eFPGA company Achronix is going public on Nasdaq via a merger with special-purpose acquisition company ACE Convergence Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: ACEV). Upon closing of the transaction, the combined operating entity retain the name Achronix Semiconductor Corporation and will be listed under the ticker symbol ACHX. According to Achronix, the transaction reflects an implied equity value ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Autonomous car company Waymo is making a point of not calling itself a self-driving car company because the company said in a blog to do so would be a dangerously misleading. Waymo says it will instead call its technology ‘fully autonomous driving technology.’ “Unfortunately, we see that some automakers use the term ‘self-driving’ in an inaccurate way, giving cons... » read more

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