Industry Restructures Around Cost


Talk to any semiconductor executive these days about what’s next for their company and you’ll probably encounter the same perspective—cost will drive future design decisions. Dig a little further, however, and you’ll find no consistent strategy for reducing that cost. While the industry has three very viable solutions for improving the power and performance characteristics of SoCs—... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing & Design


Tensions between the U.S. and China are growing. In a research report, Gus Richard, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said: “The technology sector is being impacted by U.S./Chinese tensions over cybersecurity. The combination of Huawei being blocked from doing business in the United States and the Snowden affair are impacting U.S. tech companies' prospects in China. China’s state-run media ident... » read more

China Foundries Seek Niches


By Mark LaPedus For decades, China has launched several initiatives to modernize its semiconductor industry with hopes of becoming the next IC powerhouse in Asia. In 2001, for example, China unveiled its so-called "Tenth Five-Year Plan," which called for the nation to build 25 new fabs from 2001 to 2005. At the time, the Chinese government hoped to start and fund a new crop of domestic fou... » read more

The Week In Review: July 19


By Ed Sperling Synopsys rolled out a 28nm data converter IP portfolio for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, as well as integrated PLLs. Synopsys says the new architecture saves up to 76% of the power and 86% of area. Mentor Graphics added intelligent software-driven verification to its functional verification platform. New is the ability to automatically generate embedded ... » read more

Mixed Signals


By Mark LaPedus Based on the various forecasts for semiconductor equipment, the mood is mixed at this week’s Semicon West trade show in San Francisco. In its mid-year forecast, for example, SEMI predicts that the semiconductor equipment market will reach $36.3 billion in 2013, down 1.7% over 2012. But the business is expected to rebound and reach $43.98 billion in 2014, a 21.2 percent inc... » read more

Trickle Down Equipment Economics


By Jeff Chappell By now, with the rise of China as a center of manufacturing, everyone in the chip industry has no doubt heard of the supposed Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." It's practically cliché. The thing is, the next two industry cycles may indeed prove interesting for the used equipment market. At the moment, everyone is tired of interesting times, and those in ... » read more

Reducing Power In Plasma Display Panels


By the EEFocus staff In early 2009 there was a lot of coverage in the media at home and abroad about plasma display panel (PDP) TV sets being banned in the EU. Paul Gray, Director of European TV Research, denied the claim but did mention that they were planning to set minimum energy efficiency standards for flat-panel TVs and set maximum energy consumption limits according to screen sizes. He ... » read more

Where The Jobs Are


The job market for design and verification engineers seems to be exploding. In the past week, listings have been flooding onto jobs boards for LinkedIn semiconductor design groups. The only trouble is engineers may have to move to get the jobs—sometimes halfway around the globe. There have been a bunch of job postings for semiconductor expertise in India, the United Kingdom, as well as pla... » read more

Not A Household Name—Yet


By Alma Wang Spring and summer are typically the bustling seasons for China’s semiconductor industry. Each day, invitations arrive for members of the media to attend events, contests, and road shows. This year is different, though. It has been eerily quiet. And perhaps even stranger, a local IC design company that rarely makes media appearances announced a top-prize application design com... » read more

Outsourcing Creeps Down Into Systems


Offshoring started out as a less-expensive way of developing enterprise applications, but outsourced software development is beginning to move much deeper into the system-level design world. So far, development has evolved from just productivity applications to embedded software. Even large-scale system design is being outsourced. The next step is to outsource pieces of system-level designs, s... » read more

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