Startup Funding: December 2020


AI hardware startups were hot in our December startup-funding focus, with two companies landing rounds exceeding $100M and plenty of others seeing investment. Two Chinese EDA companies received funding in a bid to boost the country's semiconductor ecosystem. One company providing control systems for fabs achieved $8M in Series A, and both autonomous driving and electric vehicles pulled in lots ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Dialog Semiconductor will acquire Adesto Technologies for $12.55 per share in cash, or for approximately $500 million enterprise value. Founded in 2006 and based in Santa Clara, CA, Adesto provides application-specific semiconductors, embedded systems, and specialty memory for IoT and industrial IoT applications. “This acquisition substantially enhances our position in the Industrial IoT mark... » read more

Designing Hardware For Security


By Ed Sperling and Kevin Fogarty Cyber criminals are beginning to target weaknesses in hardware to take control of devices, rather than using the hardware as a stepping stone to access to the software. This shift underscores a significant increase in the sophistication of the attackers, as evidenced by the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown by Google Project Zero in 2017 (made public in Ja... » read more

Processing Moves To The Edge


Edge computing is evolving from a relatively obscure concept into an increasingly complex component of a distributed computing architecture, in which processing is being shifted toward end devices and satellite data facilities and away from the cloud. Edge computing has gained attention in two main areas. One is the [getkc id="78" kc_name="industrial IoT"], where it serves as a do-it-yoursel... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Security Addressing the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities has not gone smoothly. Intel's firmware update caused unexpected behavior and a higher than expected number of reboots for its Haswell and Broadwell chips, leading the company to recommend users stop patching until an updated version of the patch is available. Microsoft's attempts to fix the issue left some W... » read more