Startup Funding: April 2023


Packaging was a hot spot in April, with one of the largest rounds going to a middle-end-of-line advanced packaging company. A second packaging company also drew significant funding for its focus on wafer-level packaging for CMOS image sensors. Two packaging substrate manufacturers also saw investment. Two photoresist makers also drew sizeable rounds. Both they and the packaging companies are... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2023


The cost of borrowing is going up, but investors continued to pour money into the chip industry in February. Collectively, 132 companies raised more than $4.5 billion last month. One of the big beneficiaries was quantum computing, with nine companies drawing a total of more than $500 million. The bulk of that went to a quantum software and services company spun out of Alphabet, but plenty wa... » read more

Startup Funding: September 2022


The onshoring and buildout of dozens of fabs, many costing tens of billions of dollars, is beginning to spill over into other areas that are critical for chip manufacturing. Materials, in particular, which often gets little attention outside of chip manufacturing, witnessed a big spike in September 2022. In fact, seven materials companies covered in this report made up more than a third of the ... » read more

Getting To The Self-Driving Car


Realizing the vision of the fully autonomous vehicle is one of the most ambitious research and development initiatives since the Apollo program of the Space Age. While the goal of Apollo was to send a man to the Moon and safely return him to Earth, the goal of self-driving cars is to get a person out from behind the steering wheel and safely convey that person to home, work, a vacation resor... » read more

The Road To Autonomy


Visions of autonomous driving were everywhere at CES 2018 in Las Vegas and the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Still, while there is progress in the technology, it will be years before the average motorist can get a fully autonomous vehicle. Advanced driver-assistance systems are gaining in complexity and scope, representing steps toward automated driving. At CES 2018, ... » read more