A New Era For EDA


For almost the entirety of my time in EDA, which is approaching 40 years, the total number of design starts has been declining. A lot of this is to be expected. Semiconductors was the new and exciting world where startups popped up hoping to make it big in Silicon Valley, or indeed to become the next Silicon Valley, Forest, Swamp or Desert. Many of them didn't manage to get beyond a neat concep... » read more

Technical Conferences: The Insurmountable Opportunity


As a technology marketeer, I’m always looking for high-leverage events to promote our brand and gain visibility for new products and services. Let’s face it, this is the main benefit for attending a technical conference or a trade show. While the dream might be 40+ leads that are well-qualified and closable in the quarter, the reality is more of a long-game kind of strategy. For years, t... » read more

Mixed Outlook For Semi Biz


Both the IC and fab equipment industries have been enjoying a boom cycle for some time, but they could be facing speed bumps and possibly turbulence in the second half of this year and into 2019. In the first half of 2018, the industry was fueled by the momentum carried over from 2017. DRAM prices remained relatively high, which contributed to the revenue growth in the overall IC industry. M... » read more

EDA, IP Sales Strong Everywhere


EDA and semiconductor IP sales set new records around the globe, with the Americas passing the $1 billion revenue mark for the first time, according to just-released statistics from the ESD Alliance's Market Statistics Service. Newly compiled numbers for Q1 2018, the latest stats available, show growth in all regions, including Europe and Japan. In fact, the only negative number involved non... » read more

The Financial Justification For System-Level Test


Three unique trends are currently transforming high-volume manufacturing in the semiconductor industry: The increasing complexity of chip architectures (e.g., FinFET, heterogeneous integration); The explosion in the breadth and ubiquity of consumer electronics (e.g. IoT, mobile, and automotive), and Consumer expectations of a constant stream of newer, cheaper, more advanced nodes. ... » read more

Growing The Semiconductor Workforce


The engine of industry is people. Nowhere is this more true than in the semiconductor industry. Think about it. This business does not depend on harvesting natural resources. It does not require that facilities be located near transportation hubs such as shipping ports. In our industry, the key to success is literally human resources. The rapid pace of innovation that characterizes the semic... » read more

Preparing For A 5G World


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about challenges and progress in 5G with Yorgos Koutsoyannopoulos, president and CEO of Helic; Mike Fitton, senior director of strategic planning and business development at Achronix; Sarah Yost, senior product marketing manager at National Instruments; and Arvind Vel, director of product management at ANSYS. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

The Darker Side Of Consolidation


Another wave of consolidation is underway in the semiconductor industry, setting the stage for some high-stakes competitive battles over market turf and sowing confusion across the supply chain about continued support throughout a product's projected lifetime. The consolidation comes as chipmakers already are grappling with rising complexity, the loss of a roadmap for future designs as Moore... » read more

Toward Cross-Layer Resilience


Connected devices are everywhere, and the numbers are growing by orders of magnitude. There are 7 billion people on the planet, but there are expected to be many more billions of connected devices. Each person may have dozens of devices with multiple chips, and those will be connected through infrastructures filled with thousands of additional chips. The problem is that as everything gets c... » read more

Complexity, Reliability And Cost


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer's Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about future challenges in complexity, time to market and reliability issues, advanced packaging architectures, and the impact of billions of connected devices. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What is the biggest challenge you see in the semico... » read more

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