Mostly Upbeat Outlook For Chips


2019 has started with cautious optimism for the semiconductor industry, despite dark clouds that dot the horizon. Market segments such as cryptocurrencies and virtual reality are not living up to expectations, the market for smart phones appears to be saturated, and DRAM prices are dropping, leading to cut-backs in capital expenditures. EDA companies are talking about sales to China being pu... » read more

AI’s Growing Impact On Chip Design


Synopsys chairman and co-CEO Aart de Geus sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the rapid infusion of AI into electronics, how that is changing chip design and the software that runs on those chips. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: We're dealing with a bunch of new markets, more customized design, and AI seems to be creeping into everything. How does this i... » read more

It’s All About The Data


The entire tech industry has changed in several fundamental ways over the past year due to the massive growth in data. Individually, those changes are significant. Taken together, those changes will have a massive impact on the chip industry for the foreseeable future. The obvious shift is the infusion of AI (and its subcategories, machine learning and deep learning) into different markets. ... » read more

Top Stories For 2018


Each year, I look back to see what articles people like to read. The first thing that has amazed me each year at Semiconductor Engineering is that what should be a strong bias towards articles published early in the year never seems to play out. The same is true this year. More than half of the top articles were published after July. The second thing that remains constant is that people love... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In 2018


What surprised the industry in 2018?  While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon. As 2018 comes to a close, most companies are pretty happy with the way everything turned out. Business has been booming, new product categories developing, and profits are meeting or beating market expectations. "2018 was indeed a... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V Western Digital announced big plans for RISC-V with a new open source RISC-V core, an open standard initiative for cache coherent memory over a network, and an open source RISC-V instruction set simulator. The SweRV Core features a 2-way superscalar design with a 32-bit, 9 stage pipeline core. It has clock speeds of up to 1.8Ghz on a 28mm CMOS process technology and will be used in vari... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP UltraSoC debuted functional safety-focused Lockstep Monitor, a set of configurable IP blocks that are protocol aware and can be used to cross-check outputs, bus transactions, code execution, and register states between two or more redundant systems. It supports all common lockstep / redundancy architectures, including full dual-redundant lockstep, split/lock, master/checker, and... » read more

Looking Beyond The CPU


CPUs no longer deliver the same kind of of performance improvements as in the past, raising questions across the industry about what comes next. The growth in processing power delivered by a single CPU core began stalling out at the beginning of the decade, when power-related issues such as heat and noise forced processor companies to add more cores rather than pushing up the clock frequency... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Silicon Labs worked with Norway’s Q-Free to create the ParQSense Smart Parking Sensor, which helps drivers find available outdoor parking spaces. ParQSense uses the chip company’s Wonder Gecko wireless microcontroller for connectivity and control. Having gone through pilot testing in the European Union and North America this year, ParQSense is being released for commerci... » read more

The Smartphonification Of Things


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The term, ‘Internet of Things,’ was first coined more than a decade ago by technology visionary Kevin Ashton but has slowly trickled down to the world of chip design and is now mentioned constantly in conversation. The reason is simple: System-level design tools are getting sophisticated enough to handle the intricacies required by devices in an Internet of ... » read more

Newer posts →