Startup Funding: Q2 2024


AI drew more investors to the chip industry in Q2. Four AI-focused chip startups receiving rounds of more than $100 million, targeting data center ASICs for transformers, highly flexible platforms for the embedded edge, dataflow processors, and mixed-signal neuromorphic chips. In-memory computing also helped boost AI, with three companies either incorporating it into their chips or providing sp... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The Design Automation Conference morphed into the Chips to Systems Conference, reflecting an industry shift from monolithic SoCs to assemblies of chiplets in various flavors of advanced packaging. The change drew a slew of students and a resurgent buzz, fueled by discussions about heterogeneous integration, reliability, and ways to leverage AI/ML to speed up design and verification processes. ... » read more

Startup Funding: May 2023


Photonic interconnects were an area of activity in May, with two companies raising funds for what could be much faster chip-to-chip and chiplet-to-chiplet links. Microstructured optics and metasurfaces also drew investment, with four companies creating products for a range of applications from flexible LEDs to multi-wavelength spectral imaging. The large language models that power many gener... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlined its plan for a National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) to be created using a share of the $11 billion in funds from the CHIPS Act marked for research and development. While a large portion of the CHIPS Act investment is set to boost U.S. fabs and manufacturing capabilities, the NSTC aims to also support the design side, ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing Renesas introduced a narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) chipset and dev kit for the Indian market. The LTE NB-IoT modem chipset, the RH1NS200, was designed for Indian telecommunications carriers by targeting bands 1,3, 5 and 8 and by following India’s carrier-approved LTE protocol stack and software suite. Low power usage is built in — it has a low Power Saving Mode... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm and Intel Foundry Services inked a multi-generation agreement to enable chip designers to build Arm-based SoCs on the Intel 18A process. The initial focus is mobile SoC designs, but the deal allows for potential expansion into automotive, IoT, data center, aerospace, and government applications. IFS and Arm will undertake design technology co-optimization (DTCO) to optimize chip design and ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Public USB phone charging stations are now another vector that bad actors can use to plant malware and steal data on devices — known as "juice jacking," according to the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC is encouraging people to stay away from these public charging stations, found in airports and hotels, because of bad actors can install malware on the charging... » read more

Startup Funding: October 2022


Investors poured $3.5 billion into 113 startup companies in October 2022, especially new battery technology, AI hardware, and faster memory access. Battery technology dominated the fundraising in October thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy and four funding rounds that exceeded $200M. The DOE awarded sizeable grants to help 20 companies, including six startups, build out battery material ... » read more

Technical Paper Round-up: July 11


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=38 /]   Semiconductor Engineering is in the process of building this library of research papers. Please send suggestions (via comments section below) for what else you’d like us to incorporate. If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a ... » read more

ISA Extension For Low-Precision NN Training On RISC-V Cores


New technical paper titled "MiniFloat-NN and ExSdotp: An ISA Extension and a Modular Open Hardware Unit for Low-Precision Training on RISC-V cores" from researchers at IIS, ETH Zurich; DEI, University of Bologna; and Axelera AI. Abstract "Low-precision formats have recently driven major breakthroughs in neural network (NN) training and inference by reducing the memory footprint of the N... » read more

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