Changing Economics In Chip Manufacturing


The foundry and equipment businesses are poised for significant changes that could affect the balance of power far beyond just the semiconductor manufacturing sector. It’s no secret that the number of companies developing new chips at 7nm is shrinking. There will be even fewer at 5nm. The business case for moving forward is that density must provide a competitive edge. But that density imp... » read more

Prototyping Server Farms


Coming from the virtual prototyping world, I envisioned FPGA-based prototyping as mostly a one on one application, meaning that the system resides with the end user or at least in a room close to the end user. However, it turns out that a lot of companies have moved towards a physical prototyping server farm setup. Let’s look at what it means to have a prototyping server farm, the associat... » read more

ARM Buys Apical


[getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"] completed its acquisition of [getentity id="22917" comment="Apical Ltd."] for $350 million in cash. Apical provides embedded computer vision and imaging technology, which ARM said has been utilized in more than 1.5 billion smartphones and in about 300 million other consumer and industrial devices, such as digital still cameras, Internet protocol cameras, and... » read more

IP Business Models In Flux


EDA and IP suppliers are engaging with foundries earlier with each manufacturing process node, while those foundries are providing ever more optimized and tuned processes to their customers. As part of this, IP providers must port their IP offerings to the various foundries and processes, putting a squeeze on resources. That raises some difficult questions, such as how to prioritize their li... » read more

Achieve Functional Safety And High Uptime Using TMR


A look at how to build reliable FPGA-based designs, employing triple modular redundancy. To read more, click here. » read more

2.5D Becomes A Reality


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 2.5D and advanced packaging with Max Min, senior technical manager at [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"]; Rob Aitken, an [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"] fellow; John Shin, vice president at [getentity id="22903" e_name="Marvell"]; Bill Isaacson, director of ASIC marketing at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Frank Ferro, senior di... » read more

Rethinking Processor Architectures


The semiconductor industry's obsession with clock speeds, cores and how many transistors fit on a piece of silicon may be nearing an end for real this time. The [getentity id="22048" comment="IEEE"] said it will develop the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specifi... » read more

GPU-Based Computing In Photomask Manufacturing


Graphical-processing unit (GPU)-accelerated computing has reached maturity for professional, scientific computing applications. One example of this is the recent GPU-accelerated thermal application for semiconductor photomask manufacturing, which is used in 24/7 manufacturing environments. GPU-accelerated computing won’t be a universal panacea for the semiconductor industry’s “need for sp... » read more

Q&A With FAA DO-254


Aldec together with FAA DER Randall Fulton conducted a webinar to provide clarifications on some of the most commonly misunderstood objectives and aspects of DO-254. The following is the list of questions that were submitted to Aldec for the webinar. All questions are related to applying DO-254 to FPGAs and PLDs. The answers from Randall Fulton are provided correspondingly. To read more, c... » read more

Charting A New Course For Semiconductors


The semiconductor industry is at an inflection point facing challenges, including rising development costs, shrinking margins, market saturation and unprecedented consolidation. Although no stranger to boom and bust cycles, semiconductor companies are actively seeking a return to stability via a more sustainable and collaborative business paradigm. In this context, Rambus and the Global S... » read more

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