tag: economics

Fundamental Changes In Economics Of Chip Security
By Ed Sperling - 10 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

Protecting chips from cyberattacks is becoming more difficult, more expensive and much more resource-intensive, but it also is becoming increasingly necessary as some of those chips end up in mission-critical servers and in safety-critical applications such as automotive. Security has been on the semiconductor industry's radar for at least the past several years, despite spotty progress and ... » read more

The Other Storage Race
By Ed Sperling - 15 May, 2020 - Comments: 2

Tesla's push to extend the life of lithium ion batteries used in cars by repurposing them for less-intensive applications could have a major impact on the business model for a whole slew of other markets. As anyone with a smartphone knows, batteries degrade over time. A new phone holds a charge longer than one that has been in use for several years, but in the case of a smartphone that's gen... » read more

Key Drivers In New Chip Industry Outlook
By Ed Sperling - 04 May, 2020 - Comments: 0

How well the semiconductor industry fares over the next 12 to 24 months depends upon the evolution of a virus. That alone will determine the correct model for an economic rebound — V, U, extended U, or maybe even a double U. But what's also becoming clear is those models don't apply uniformly to all sectors or sub-sectors of the semiconductor industry. Looked at as a whole, the entire indu... » read more

Thinking Way, Way Outside The Box
By Ed Sperling - 09 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium has set records for global cooperation by giant companies, universities and various federal agencies and national laboratories. But it also may have cracked opened a door for much more than that. Until now, there has been a massive race for dominance in the data center. Big companies have gotten rich on data, building infrastructure at a col... » read more

What’s Changing, What Isn’t
By Ed Sperling - 26 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

The global pandemic is creating economic chaos on a global scale. The big question now is when the coronavirus is brought under control, and just how long its effects will extend beyond the current health crisis. For the semiconductor industry, which has weathered many long and deep financial swings, this one at least is finite. When the virus stops spreading, or when treatments are availabl... » read more

Test Costs Spiking
By Ed Sperling - 10 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 1

The cost of test is rising as a percentage of manufacturing costs, fueled by concerns about reliability of advanced-node designs in cars and data centers, as well as extended lifetimes for chips in those and other markets. For decades, test was limited to a flat 2% of total manufacturing cost, a formula developed prior to the turn of the Millennium after chipmakers and foundries saw the traj... » read more

Moore And More
By Paul McLellan - 13 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 0

For more than 50 years, the semiconductor industry has enjoyed the benefits of Moore's Law — or so it seemed. In reality, there were three laws rolled up into one: Each process generation would have a higher clock speed at the same power. This was not discovered by Moore, but by Dennard, who also invented the DRAM. Process generations continue to get faster and lower power, but the power... » read more

Millimeter Wave: A Bridge Too Far?
By Ed Sperling - 06 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 1

5G is here. It already is available in new mobile phones, and the infrastructure for extremely fast cellular communication is being built out at a rapid pace. The big question now is which parts of this technology will be successful, and there still is no consistency in those predictions. 5G comes in two flavors, sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave, and the sub-6 GHz version offers immediate perfo... » read more

Testing Autonomous Vehicles
By Ed Sperling - 16 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

Jeff Phillips, head of automotive marketing at National Instruments, talks about how to ensure that automotive systems are reliable and safe, how test needs to shift to adapt to continual updates and changes, and why this is particularly challenging in a world where there is no known right answer. » read more

Preparing For The Great Auto War
By Ed Sperling - 05 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 7

The internal combustion engine's days are numbered, and what comes next is going to cause one of the biggest upheavals in the history of business. Before semiconductors and electronics, it was the auto industry that defined economies of scale. In fact, the auto industry became the model on which the entire electronics industry was built. It always was assumed that the mainframe, minicomputer... » read more

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