Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research In the second quarter of 2019, TrendForce said that the top-5 foundry rankings remained identical with that of last year. But sixth to tenth place showed some changes. Who is up or down in what is a tough business climate? Global fab equipment spending will rebound in 2020, growing 20% to $58.4 billion after dropping 19% to $48.4 billion in 2019, according to SEMI. However, ... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Products/Services Mentor, a Siemens Business, announced the release of the final phase of the Valor software New Product Introduction design-for-manufacturing technology, automating printed circuit board design reviews. The company has integrated DFM technology into the Xpedition software layout application. Arteris IP reports that Toshiba has taped out its next-generation advanced driv... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Intel will acquire Barefoot Networks, a maker of programmable Ethernet switch silicon and the P4 networking programming language for data centers. Founded in 2013, the Santa Clara-based company has raised $155.4 million in funding. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Intel expects the acquisition to be final in the third quarter of this year. Tools & IP Mentor extended it... » read more

Predictions: Methodologies And Tools


Predictions are divided into four posts this year. Part one covered markets and drivers. The second part looked at manufacturing, devices and companies and this part will cover methodologies and tools. In addition, the outlook from EDA executives will be provided in a separate post. Intellectual property As designs get larger, it should be no surprise that the size of the [getkc id="43" kc_... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 29


Could video goggles, and a tiny implant cure blindness? Incredibly, the world of medical research is on the verge of curing blindness. Similar to cochlear implants for deaf people, Stanford University scientists and engineers are developing new devices to this end, including a bionic vision system based on photovoltaic implants, which is awaiting approval for human clinical trials in Europe. A... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 30


Probing photon-electron interactions According to Rice University researchers, where light and matter intersect, the world illuminates; where they interact so strongly that they become one, they illuminate a world of new physics. Here, the team is closing in on a way to create a new condensed matter state in which all the electrons in a material act as one by manipulating them with light and a... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys updated its static timing analysis tool to use smart engineering change order (ECO) technology, which the company says reduces memory requirements by 5X and speeds runtime by 2X. The release also allows more scenarios on a single server, or flexible distribution to take advantage of customers' private compute clouds. IP Synopsys released MIPI display and camera interface... » read more

A Formal Transformation


A very important change is underway in functional verification. In the past, this was an esoteric technology and one that was difficult to deploy. It was relegated to tough problems late in the verification cycle, and it was difficult to justify the ROI unless the technology actually did find some problems. But all of that has changed. Formal verification companies started to use the technology... » read more