Terrific Year, Terrific Outlook


2017 was a terrific year. Chip revenues closed at nearly $440B, an impressive 22 percent year-over-year growth. The equipment industry surpassed revenue levels last reached in the year 2000. Semiconductor equipment posted sales of nearly $56B and semiconductor materials $48B in 2017. For semiconductor equipment, this was a giant 36 percent year-over-year growth. Samsung, alone, invested $26... » read more

Collaborative Multi-Board System Design


Designing electronic systems has become measurably more complex during the past decade. Many of the products that are developed today are in-fact complex interconnected systems. Using the automotive market as an example, the first level of a system is an element; an individual component or sub-assembly that is designed to be part of a larger collaborating function. At the next level is the sub-... » read more

SoC Design Management Software: Proprietary Vs. Open Source


These days, there’s a tendency to read the word “proprietary” and think “bad,” as if whatever is proprietary is inflexible and limited capability. It’s a legacy from the emergence of open-source software, when “open” became associated with progress and “proprietary” became bad. But in many industries, proprietary solutions to this day have enormous value, deliver trust, s... » read more

Why Instrumentation Isn’t Optional


When writing code it is often useful to add informational statements that give an insight into control flow and data management as well as aiding in observation of the actual code at runtime. As such, instrumentation is an important component of code running on a live system. The proliferation of "printf" debug statements, whereby data is output to a console, is testament to this. Sending te... » read more

SoC Integration Headaches Grow


As the number of IP blocks grows, so do the headaches of integrating the various pieces and making sure they perform as planned within a prescribed power envelope. This is easier said than done, particularly at the most advanced process nodes. There are more blocks, more power domains, more states and use-model dependencies, and there is much more contention for memories. There are physical ... » read more

Chip Manufacturing Data Now Requires Cloud Techniques


The parameters in semiconductor manufacturing are growing so large that an analysis method similar to what’s currently used for big data is now required. The good news is that big data analysis techniques, which process a vast amount of data such as search data and communication logs in the cloud, is entirely applicable to the data of semiconductor process. Photo 1: Opening view of AEC... » read more

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