tag: business

The Great Chip Shakeup
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2018 - Comments: 2

Facebook, Alibaba, Google, Apple and Samsung are all designing their own chips. So are Cisco and Huawei. So what exactly does this mean for big chipmakers and the semiconductor ecosystem? While your first impulse might be to draw a straight line between Qualcomm's decision to cut 1,500 jobs and reports about giant systems companies developing chips in-house, it's not clear there is any corre... » read more

Artificial, With Questionable Intelligence
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2018 - Comments: 1

A common theme is emerging in the race to develop big machines that can navigate through a world filled with people, animals, and other assorted objects—if an accident is inevitable, what options are available to machines and how should they decide?   This question was raised at a number of semiconductor industry conferences over the past few weeks, which is interesting because this idea h... » read more

Smaller, Faster, Cheaper—But Different
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 0

The old mantra of "smaller, faster, cheaper" has migrated from the chip level to the electronic system level, raising some interesting questions about where the real value is being generated. Smaller as it pertains to gate size, line widths and spaces, will continue in an almost straight line for at least the next decade. The ability to print three-dimensional features on a nanoscale using E... » read more

Wafer Demand: Under Pressure But Still Growing
By Joanne Itow - 19 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 1

Wafer demand grew 10.7% in 2017 while total semiconductor units grew 13.4%. Due to the tight supply of silicon wafers and increased prices, most manufactures placed an even higher priority on improving yields. The industry’s focus on yield improvements is relentless but especially important when the cost of key input materials is on the rise. In 2017 the semiconductor products that con... » read more

New Applications, Multiple Approaches
By Gary Patton - 15 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 0

It may be tempting to view the strong demand for semiconductors as just one more up-cycle in our traditionally cyclical industry, but what’s really driving things right now is the opening of entirely new horizons, made possible by the increased capabilities of today’s chips. Chip demand is no longer only being driven by the needs of computer and smartphone manufacturers. Now, a mushroomi... » read more

Tech Talk: eFPGA Density
By Ed Sperling - 01 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 0

Chen Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, talks about how to improve density in embedded FPGAs. https://youtu.be/Rk0oqzWQr8I » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines (March 2018)
By Brian Bailey - 01 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 0

Wally Rhines, president and CEO of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss a wide range of industry and technology changes and how that will play out over the next few years. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What will happen in the end markets? Rhines: The end markets are perhaps more exciting from a... » read more

Why EDA Needs To Change
By Brian Bailey - 26 Feb, 2018 - Comments: 6

Why is it taking so long for [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"] to have an impact within EDA? Most of the time when I talk to the experts within the field I hear about why designs are so different from other machine learning applications, and I know that is true. Many of you reading this may not be aware that I was a developer of EDA tools for more than 35 years before I ended up writi... » read more

Race Of Nations
By Ed Sperling - 15 Feb, 2018 - Comments: 0

Technology is the next arms race, and this is not just about national defense in the traditional sense. Countries collectively are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into developing technology for the future, from education to outright grants and seed funding, and they are working with private industry to continue investing in their respective national futures. Which technologies and na... » read more

Customizing Power And Performance
By Ed Sperling - 08 Feb, 2018 - Comments: 0

Designing chips is getting more difficult, and not just for the obvious technical reasons. The bigger issue revolves around what these chips going to be used for-and how will they be used, both by the end user and in the context of other electronics. This was a pretty simple decision when hardware was developed somewhat independently of software, such as in the PC era. Technology generally d... » read more

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