Energy-Efficient Design Helps Autonomous Vehicles Take Off


A new flight endurance record was set recently by the Predator B/MQ-9 Reaper Big Wing experimental drone, traveling 37 hours non-stop, and setting the bar for the next stage of autonomous flight development. The growth of drone technology and their autonomous capabilities for surveillance, security, and reconnaissance has grown rapidly over the past several years, thanks to ever-increasing perf... » read more

Sharing Information About Corner Cases


The definition of what is good enough when it comes to new technology is still evolving. In safety-critical applications, as well as a number of other areas such as drones or domestic robots, people will need to watch over all machines very closely rather than the other way around. While these machines may serve a useful purpose, they also need to be monitored to ensure they don't go too far as... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, opens up on the next big things, what will drive them, and what will change to make that happen. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest changes in the semiconductor industry over the past year? Tan: The whole system approach to designing hardware and software is really happening now. It will continue to expand fr... » read more

What Will China Do Next?


China's attempts to buy up U.S. chip companies is undergoing more gyrations, this time spurred by the exchange rate set by the People's Bank of China and the U.S. Federal Reserve's expected interest rate hikes. The central bank dropped the exchange rate of the yuan versus the dollar to its lowest rate since 2011, according to Bloomberg. The current rate is now 6.55 yuan per dollar, compared ... » read more

System Bits: April 26


Reconfigured Tesla coil electrifies materials In a development that could set a clear path toward scalable assembly of nanotubes from the bottom up, Rice University researchers have discovered that the strong force field emitted by a Tesla coil causes carbon nanotubes to self-assemble into long wires, a phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis. Rice chemist Paul Cherukuri led the team that develo... » read more

System Bits: March 15


Drilling into metabolic details with big data In a development that may help researchers find new therapeutic targets for cancer and other diseases, Rice University researchers have created a fast computational method to model tissue-specific metabolic pathways. The team explained that metabolic pathways are immense networks of biochemical reactions that keep organisms functioning and are a... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


NuFlare Technology wants to enter a new market. The e-beam giant and NGR are jointly collaborating on a development program for next-generation electron-beam wafer inspection and metrology. It’s unclear if NuFlare is developing a single- or multi-beam tool, however. Don’t look now, but a fab tool downturn could be on the horizon. This comes amid a slowdown in PCs, tablets and smartphone... » read more

A Bird’s Eye View


We are living in the age of pictures. Just about any event or non-event in our life is being captured in a picture. Even more so, a lot of those pictures are being shared with others. It offers us a way to share a moment with the ones who weren’t there. Living with my wife and children in Silicon Valley, far away from our family in Belgium, it provides us with a way to show what we are up to ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 26


Arctic Neutrinos From Space Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) has observed high-energy neutrinos stemming from outside the solar system, an event that could provide some clues about the universe. Researchers observed the sub-atomic particles at IceCube, a huge neutrino detector in Antarctica. TUM has observed 28 neutrinos that most likely came from cosmic objects. The IceCube observato... » read more

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