The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Is the sky falling in the IC equipment market? Not yet, but watch out below. Semi capital spending is expected to reach $60.37 billion in 2015, down 1% from 2014, according to Pacific Crest Securities. “Although we trimmed 2016 capex three weeks ago, we are trimming some more. We now see semiconductor capex down 4% in 2016. However, we do not see capex falling off a cliff in 2016 (i.e., down ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung Semiconductor unveiled its North American R&D Headquarters for its Device Solutions group in San Jose, Calif. The new campus is a 1.1 million-square-foot R&D, sales and marketing center. Is 5G the next big thing in wireless? Verizon–the first company to introduce 4G LTE–is once again poised to usher in a new era with an aggressive roadmap for fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless t... » read more

Appetite For Services Grows


Semiconductor service revenues have been growing for the past year, fueled by complex thermal and power issues at advanced nodes, the difficulty of integrating more and more IP blocks, and far more techniques, languages and methodologies that engineers need to learn to be productive in the finFET generation. The services business typically acts as a bridge between down and up cycles in the c... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

5 Things To Know About The IoT


The IoT means many things to many people. While the numbers and projections are all very large, the views of what it actually means are vastly different because it can include anything from a sensor in a car or an ingestible medical device to a data center full of servers and the connectivity in between. But there are some interesting shifts under way, both driving the [getkc id="76" comment... » read more

Foundries Expand Planar Efforts


Competition is heating up in the leading-edge foundry business, as vendors begin to ramp up their new 16nm/14nm finFET processes. But that’s not the only action in the foundry arena. They are also expanding their efforts in the leading-edge planar market by rolling out new 28nm and 22nm processes. On one front, TSMC is offering new 28nm variants, based on bulk CMOS technology. And on an... » read more

Traffic Jam?


This week, the first week in which school was out of session for the summer, I noticed that my commute to work was much shorter than it had been, reduced from about 25 minutes to 15 minutes. It’s always hard for me to believe that such a simple thing, as fewer drivers on the road due to summer vacations, is enough to cause such wild swings in commute times. I took advantage of the additional ... » read more

New Robots For The IoT


Until recently, remote telepresence has largely been a fixed screen with a video link between participants, and mostly in business setting. But all of that is about to change once the [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"]/Internet of Everything begins to take root. There is a plethora of development going on in mobile robotic telepresence (MRT). Companies such as iRobot, Cisco, Suitab... » read more

Stacked Die, Phase Two


The initial hype phase of [getkc id="82" kc_name="2.5D"] appears to be over. There are multiple offerings in development or on the market already from Xilinx, Altera, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, AMD, all focused on better throughput over shorter distances with better yield and lower power. Even Intel has jumped on the bandwagon, saying that 2.5D will be essential for extending [getkc id="74" comment="M... » read more

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