Why Chiplets Are So Critical In Automotive

By John Koon - 20 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 1

Chiplets are gaining renewed attention in the automotive market, where increasing electrification and intense competition are forcing companies to accelerate their design and production schedules. Electrification has lit a fire under some of the biggest and best-known carmakers, which are struggling to remain competitive in the face of very short market windows and constantly changing requir... » read more

Chiplets: Deep Dive Into Designing, Manufacturing, And Testing

By The SE Staff - 07 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Chiplets are a disruptive technology. They change the way chips are designed, manufactured, tested, packaged, as well as the underlying business relationships and fundamentals. But they also open the door to vast new opportunities for existing chipmakers and startups to create highly customized components and systems for specific use cases and market segments. This LEGO-like approach sounds ... » read more

Startup Funding: May 2023

By Jesse Allen - 07 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

Chip Industry Startup Funding Annual Report & Analysis: 2022

By The SE Staff - 31 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

Introduction New ideas fuel the semiconductor industry, and money enables those ideas. Tracking what startups get funded is one way to see which ideas are more viable and which problems need to be solved most urgently. In general, the more startups working on a solution to a particular problem, the greater the need for a viable solution — and the more likely one will be developed. Investo... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2022

By Jesse Allen - 04 May, 2022 - Comments: 0

Silicon photonics holds the potential to vastly increase bandwidth in chips and systems while reducing power use — and investors are taking note. In April, one of the largest funding rounds went to a startup developing chip-to-chip optical I/O. But that wasn't all. Photonics funding showed up in AI with a photonic Tensor core, in room-temperature quantum computing, and, of course, in lidar an... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power

By Jesse Allen - 11 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 0

Intellectual Property Flex Logix inked an agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate (AFRL/RY) covering any Flex Logix IP technology for use in all US Government-funded programs for research and prototyping purposes with no license fees. “Our first license with AFRL for EFLX eFPGA in GlobalFoundries 12nm process was highly successful, with more than a half dozen pr... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2022

By Jesse Allen - 07 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 0

Mega-rounds dominated venture funding in February, with ten companies seeing investment of $100 million or more, five of which exceeded $200 million. Automotive was the big winner, with seven of the ten companies involved in either developing ADAS and autonomous driving, building electric vehicles, or making components to go in cars. The largest round of the month falls into that last category,... » read more

Startup Funding: November 2020

By Jesse Allen - 02 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Numerous chipmakers pulled in funding in November 2020, with investors putting money into interconnects, memories, AI hardware, and quantum computing. Launching from stealth was a startup aiming to combine AI and 5G. Autonomous delivery did well, too, with one company raising a massive $500M. This month, we take a look at 28 companies that raised a collective $1.1B. Semi & design Connec... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

By Mark LaPedus - 27 Sep, 2019 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) has satisfied all closing conditions for the full acquisition of Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd. (MIFS), the former 300mm wafer foundry joint venture between UMC and Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd. (FSL). The completion of the acquisition is scheduled for Oct. 1. In 2014, FSL and UMC agreed for UMC to acquire a 15.9% stake in MIFS from FSL through pr... » read more

Ayar Labs: Faster I/O

By Kevin Fogarty - 19 Feb, 2018 - Comments: 1

Startup AyarLabs is using a combination of high-bandwidth fiberoptics, low-cost CMOS fabrication and careful target selection to strike efficiently at the datacenter's worst bottleneck. "Moore's Law only covers the processor, not how we move data in and out of it during processing or how to get the processor and memory working at the same speed," according to Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, co-f... » read more

Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.