Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

How AI Will Automate Chip Design


AI has been used in EDA for many years for the core algorithms in tools, but it's getting smarter and more optimized with the rollout of generative and agentic AI. As it evolves and improves, hardware engineers are finding ways to leverage it for more complex tasks. Ziyad Hanna, corporate vice president at Cadence, talks about five levels of autonomy in chip design that mirror those in the auto... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government announced new import tariff actions and deals this week, including: The EU: 15% tariff on most goods including semiconductors. According to the EU's president, the action excludes semiconductor equipment. Copper: 50% tariff on all imports of semi-finished copper products and intensive copper derivative products, effective Aug. 1, but raw input material is excluded. ... » read more

High-Fidelity Noise Prediction for Aerospace and Automotive Industries


Accurate noise prediction is essential for designing quieter, more efficient aircraft and vehicles. However, traditional experimental methods are often expensive, time-consuming, and limited in scope. This white paper outlines how an advanced computational tool leverages large-eddy simulations (LES) to deliver accurate, cost-effective aeroacoustics simulations. Key Takeaways: Advance... » read more

Automotive OEMs Focus On SDVs, Zonal Architectures


Giant automotive OEMs are re-evaluating how quickly to move to advanced technologies and software-driven designs amid crushing financial pressure from low-cost EVs developed in other markets such as China. U.S., European, and Japanese OEMs have been struggling for the past half-decade or so to figure out which is the best approach to developing EVs, undergoing multiple shifts in both hardwar... » read more

Data Routing In Heterogeneous Chip Designs


Ensuring data gets to where it's supposed to go at exactly the right time is a growing challenge for design engineers and architects developing heterogeneous systems. There is more data moving around these chips with dozens of targets, which makes routing signals much more complicated. Ronen Perets, senior product marketing manager at Cadence Design Systems, talks about some of the new problems... » read more

Intel and Cadence Collaboration on UCIe: Demonstration of Simulation Interoperability


The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) 1.0 specification was announced in early 2022. A new updated UCIe 1.1 specification was released on August 8, 2023. The standardized open chiplet standard allows for heterogeneous integration of die-to-die link interconnects within the same package. The UCIe standard allows for advanced package and standard package options to tradeoff cost, band... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Chinese firms imported almost $26 billion worth of chipmaking machinery, according to fresh trade data released by China’s General Administration of Customs this week, Bloomberg reports. Meanwhile, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry continued to show signs of improvement in Q2 2024 with significant growth of IC sales, stabilizing capital expenditure, and an increase in install... » read more

Sensor Fusion Challenges In Automotive


The number of sensors in automobiles is growing rapidly alongside new safety features and increasing levels of autonomy. The challenge is integrating them in a way that makes sense, because these sensors are optimized for different types of data, sometimes with different resolution requirements even for the same type of data, and frequently with very different latency, power consumption, and re... » read more

Quantum Well Design Basics


Key Takeaways The choice of materials for the quantum well and barrier layers is paramount. Materials must have compatible lattice structures to minimize defects, with common combinations including GaAs/AlGaAs, InGaAs/InP, and GaN/AlGaN. The width of the quantum well significantly influences the energy levels and density of states, where narrower wells result in greater separation betwe... » read more

← Older posts