Regulations Trail Autonomous Vehicles


Fragmented regulations and unrealistic expectations may be the biggest hurdles for chipmakers selling into the market for self-driving cars during the next few years. Carmakers and the semiconductor industry have made tremendous progress building real-time vision systems and artificial intelligence into relatively traditional automobiles during the past decade or so. But federal and state re... » read more

Global Investment Is Key To The Semiconductor Ecosystem


In response to the European Commission’s (EC) proposed framework for screening foreign direct investments (FDI), SEMI, representing the global electronics manufacturing supply chain, offers three recommendations for consideration by EU policymakers: To support the sophisticated global ecosystem of semiconductor manufacturers, the EU should remain open to global investment. More efforts sho... » read more

Preparing For AI


Suppose an autonomous car is coming up an on-ramp onto a bridge. The ramp is fine, but the bridge is icy, and there’s an overturned bus full of children blocking several lanes. Children are evacuating through the windows and milling around on the pavement. There isn’t time to stop, even with the better-than-human reaction time an autonomous car might have. Swerving to one side might send... » read more

Too Many, Too Few Rare Earths


A team from Japan recently made a major discovery—they found massive deposits of rare earths on the ocean floor off the coast of Japan. The team of Waseda University, the University of Tokyo and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) found a deposit that equates to 16 million tons of rare earths. Rare earths are a group of critical materials used in various ele... » read more

Privacy Is In Retreat


It was always a given that when you were online, you're in public. The deceptive piece is that your online activities can appear very distant from your physical location. You might be shopping from the comfort and seeming privacy of your living room, or texting on your smart phone before you get out of bed. This created a lot of buzz initially, but over the past year or so the level of paran... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers The IC industry continues to consolidate. For example, Qualcomm has a proposed plan to buy NXP. And then, Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm. Who is next? In a research note, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves said: “According to Bloomberg, Microsemi is exploring a sale and we think logical acquirers could include Skyworks. We continue to view Microsemi as a notable strategic as... » read more

Metal Markets In Flux


Markets for critical metals are becoming turbulent, creating shortages and widespread supply chain concerns. Critical metals are the raw elements and materials used in the production of aerospace/defense systems, automobiles, batteries, computers and electronic products. Many critical metals also are scarce, and there is high risk associated with their supply. In a recent report, the Europea... » read more

3D Neuromorphic Architectures


Matrix multiplication is a critical operation in conventional neural networks. Each node of the network receives an input signal, multiplies it by some predetermined weight, and passes the result to the next layer of nodes. While the nature of the signal, the method used to determine the weights, and the desired result will all depend on the specific application, the computational task is simpl... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Commentary Chris Voce of Forrester Research writes that the Internet of Things next year will move beyond experimentation in this piece. “At Forrester we believe IoT extends beyond devices and connectivity,” he writes. “But it's the business impact of IoT that truly defines what it is: the insights that you can derive with analytics and the business outcomes you can achieve.” M&A M... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 17


GOOI FETs The next-generation power semiconductor market is heating up. Two wide-bandgap technologies—gallium nitride (GaN) on silicon devices and silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs—are ramping up in the power semi market. In addition, the industry is also exploring various futuristic technologies, such as bulk vertical GaN, diamond FETs and others. Purdue University has demonstrated another... » read more

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