System Bits: Sept. 17


Quantum computing R&D in Germany IBM is teaming with the Fraunhofer Society for research and development of quantum computing technology, backed by the German government, which is providing €650 million (about $715.4 million) in funding over two years for the program. IBM has agreed to install a Q System One system at one of its facilities in Germany for the program. The system has 20... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Products/Services Rambus agreed to acquire Hillsboro, Ore.-based Northwest Logic, a purveyor of memory, PCIe, and MIPI digital controllers. The transaction is expected to close in the current quarter. Financial terms weren’t disclosed; Rambus said in a statement, “Although this transaction will not materially impact 2019 results due to the expected timing of close and acquisition accountin... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Products/Services Arteris IP reports that Bitmain licensed the Arteris Ncore Cache Coherent Interconnect intellectual property for use in its next-generation Sophon Tensor Processing Unit system-on-a-chip devices for the scalable hardware acceleration of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. “Our choice of interconnect IP became more important as we continued to increase t... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things The Wing unit of Alphabet this summer will begin making drone deliveries in the Vuosarri district of Helsinki, Finland. The unmanned aerial vehicles will bear food and other items from Herkku Food, a gourmet market, and the Café Monami restaurant. The drones will bear deliveries of up to 3.3 pounds over distances of up to 6.2 miles. Comcast is reportedly developing an in... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers GlobalFoundries has announced that its advanced silicon-germanium (SiGe) offering is available for prototyping on 300mm wafers. GF’s SiGe technology has been shipping on its 200mm production line in Burlington, Vt. The technology, a 90nm SiGe process, is moving to 300mm wafers at GF’s Fab 10 facility in East Fishkill, N.Y. The SiGe technology is called 9HP. “The increasing ... » read more

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

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