Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


IoT/Edge Achronix teamed up with Bittware to develop a smart accelerator card based on a 7nm FPGA from Achronix. The card is targeted for edge devices, where pre-processing and acceleration of data movement is critical due to the enormous quantity of data being generated by sensors. The strategy is to move the processing closer to the data, rather than processing input from multiple sensors in... » read more

Optima Design Launches, Focuses On Functional Safety


Autonomous driving is really happening. "Although a concept and dream for many automotive enthusiasts and engineers since the 1950s, now it's really happening," asserted Jamil Mazzawi, founder and CEO of Optima Design, which launched today. “At the same time, everybody knows that if we continue to have accidents, like the Tesla accident or the Uber accident, this will not work. People will... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services Rambus reports completing the sale of its Payments and Ticketing businesses to Visa for $75 million in cash. “With 30 years of experience pushing the envelope in semiconductor design, we look toward a future of continued innovation to carry on our mission of making data faster and safer,” Rambus President and CEO Luc Seraphin said in a statement. “Completing this transa... » read more

Functional Safety Implementation Goes Mainstream


Electronics engineers are being thrust into the automotive market like never before. The move to electrify automobiles, along with the advent of self-driving cars, means that silicon designers will be designing ever more sophisticated automotive ICs. But cars aren’t like most other electronic systems; it’s imperative that they cause no harm should they fail. This brings us to the realm o... » read more

IP Management And Development At 5/3nm


The growing complexity of moving to new process nodes is making it much more difficult to create, manage and re-use IP. There are more rules, more data to manage, and more potential interactions as density increases, both in planar implementations and in advanced packaging. And the problems only get worse as designs move to 5nm and 3nm, and as more heterogeneous components such as accelerato... » 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

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Allegro DVT acquired Amphion Semiconductor, bringing together two developers of video codec IP. Allegro DVT said the merger will make it the first semiconductor IP company to offer commercially available hardware-based, real-time encoder and decoder solutions for the new AV1 video encoding format for SoC implementations, supporting 4K/UHD up to 8K. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Amphion wa... » read more

Less Food, More Thought


A trillion "things" are expected to be connected to the Internet sometime in the next decade. No matter how power-efficient these things are, they probably will require enough coin-sized lithium batteries to drain the world's supply of element No. 3 on the Periodic Table. They also will increase the demand for power everywhere, and that's even before tacking on electric vehicles, the edge, robo... » read more

Focus Shifts To Wasted Power


Mobile phones made the industry aware of power, but now the focus is shifting to the total energy needed to perform a task. Activity that is unnecessary to perform the intended task is wasted power, and reducing it requires some new methodologies and structural changes within development teams. There is a broadening awareness about power. "The companies doing SoCs for mobile lead the charge ... » read more

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