The Price Of Fear


Fear sells, and judging from the attendance numbers and the messages coming out of this week's RSA Conference, it's selling quite well. Increasing connectedness comes at a significant price, and apparently lots of people are willing to pay that price. Security has become a huge and growing business. Attendance is one indicator. There were an estimated 40,000 attendees at this year's conferen... » read more

What’s After Smartphones?


One of the unique things about the semiconductor industry is that it has fueled the digital revolution almost entirely by focusing on its core competencies of performance, power and area. There are few, if any, industries that can tie global growth and success to what amounts to an almost isolationist business model. Salespeople have to sell those chips, of course. Marketers have to create ... » read more

Racing To Design Chips Faster


A shift is underway to develop chips for more narrowly defined market segments, and in much smaller production runs. Rather than focusing on shrinking features and reducing cost per transistor by the billions of units, the emphasis behind this shift is less about scale and much more about optimization for specific markets and delivering those solutions more quickly. As automotive, consumer e... » read more

Tech Talk: ISO 26262


Arteris' Kurt Shuler talks about the automotive design standard, how it applies to semiconductors, and where engineers run into problems. » read more

What The Next Era Of Automotive Design Will Require


ARM, automotive, automotive electronics, lower-power processors, ADAS, automated driver assist, smart cars, autonomous vehicles, TECHnalysis, Your father’s automotive market, with its long design cycles and reluctance for change, is in the rear-view mirror— a spec on the horizon in fact. The industry’s enthusiastic embrace of electronics — and the astonishing cost, functional, safety... » read more

Executive Insight: Paul Kocher


Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Rambus' Cryptography Research Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the state of security today and how it will be affected as more devices are connected. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The number of vulnerabilities is increasing. Are we making progress? Kocher: If your metric for progress is the... » read more

In The Era Of Driverless Cars, OTP Will Rule


Visit any car dealership these days and prepare to be amazed by the amount of electronics that comes standard with each car. That’s about to get even more evident as we head into the era of the driverless car, otherwise known as the connected or autonomous car. Who isn’t ready to leave the driving to electronics? The typical driver won’t be all that interested to learn that embedded me... » read more

Time For Change


Semiconductor companies have been knocking on doors outside of the computer industry for the better part of two decades, pitching the value of digital and mixed-signal technology for improving efficiency in many market sectors. For most of that time, they received polite nods, occasional inquiries for more information and not much else. But over the past several years, those doors have open... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Tools and Flows


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

Are Chips Getting More Reliable?


Reliability is emerging as a key metric in the semiconductor industry, alongside of power, performance and cost, but it also is becoming harder to measure and increasingly difficult to achieve. Most large semiconductor companies look at reliability in connection with consumer devices that last several years before they are replaced, but a big push into automotive, medical and industrial elec... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →