Startup Funding: April 2020


It was another strong month for automotive startups, with one autonomous trucking company in China drawing a massive $100M investment. Another hot area was optimization of machine learning deployments, including one new company launch. Quantum computing, etch equipment, and mmWave feature in this month's look at twenty-two startups that collectively raised $375M. Semiconductors & design ... » read more

A New Co-Simulation Approach for Tolerance Analysis on Vehicle Propulsion Subsystem


An increasing demand for reducing cost and time effort of the design process via improved CAE (ComputerAided Engineer) tools and methods has characterized the automotive industry over the past two decades. One of the main challenges involves the effective simulation of a vehicle’s propulsion system dealing with different physical domains: several examples have been proposed in the literature ... » read more

Who Owns A Car’s Chip Architecture


Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, examines the competitive battle brewing between OEMs and Tier 1s over who owns the architecture of the electronic systems and the underlying chip hardware. This has become a growing point of contention as both struggle for differentiation in a market where increasingly autonomous vehicles will all behave the same way. That, in turn, has si... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Data center, 5G security Nvidia won approval for its Mellanox Technologies Ltd. deal from China, according to an article on Bloomberg. Mellanox chips split up and manage AI datasets for parallel processing, which can be used in data centers for computing. Rambus has released security for 800 Gigbit Ethernet MAC (media access control) for enhanced data center and 5G infrastructure. It secure... » read more

A Node Too Far?


Physics is an unforgiving master. While the semiconductor industry has been actively developing new transistor structures, new materials for interconnects and lining trenches, and new approaches to alleviate congestion at the lowest metal levels, it also has been playing an accelerating game of Whac-a-Mole. Whenever a problem pops up, the solution to that problem is never complete and more prob... » read more

Practical Processor Verification


Custom processors are making a resurgence, spurred on by the early success of the RISC-V ISA and the ecosystem that is rapidly building around it. But this shift is amid questions about whether processor verification has become a lost art. Years ago custom processors were common. But as the market consolidated around a handful of companies, so did the tools and expertise needed to develop th... » read more

Re-Imagining The GPU


John Rayfield, CTO at Imagination Technologies, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about RISC-V, AI, and computing architectures. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What your plans are for RISC-V? Rayfield: We're actively finalizing the integration of RISC-V cores into future-generation GPUs. That work has been going on for several months. Moving forward, we'... » read more

Using Big Data For Yield And Reliability


John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB, talks about the importance of clean data for traceability, yield improvement and device reliability, where and how it gets cleaned, and why that needs to be accompanied by domain expertise. » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


COVID-19, IoT Last week, the United States’ Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) announced it will not enforce penalties for certain U.S. HIPAA Rules violations involving COVID-19 testing sites. HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, protects privacy of health information. Lawyers are looking it over. "Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, providers are ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


COVID-19/Medical Mentor's parent company Siemens is making its Additive Manufacturing (AM) Network, along with its 3D printers, available to the global medical community. MEMS is at the forefront of SARS-CoV-2 testing, writes Alissa M. Fitzgerald, founder of AMFitzgerald in a blog on SEMI.org. Fitzgerald points out a MEMS silicon PCR chip, developed by Northrup et. al. at Lawrence Livermore... » read more

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