Semicon West Preview: Packaging


By Paula Doe The evolving mobile device market means the packaging, assembly and test supply chain faces a growing range of alternative technologies vying for its investment dollar, everything from Google’s modular electronics with 3D printing, to more solutions for integrating varied chips in smaller packaged systems. One potentially disruptive change is the wider use of more open-source... » read more

Google Project Ara And The Low-Power Imperative


You’ve no doubt seen the slides: 50 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices by 2020. That’s an amazing number, but consider this: What if they each draw 1W? All things begin equal, we’d have to build another 50 nuclear power plants in the world to handle that additional energy requirement. (Something tells me that outcome is unrealistic). Power takes center stage as we evolve into ... » read more

Real Countries Have Fabs


Persistent rumblings about the sale of IBM’s semiconductor unit might have seemed absurd a couple decades ago—before IBM sold off its PC unit to Lenovo and lost the gaming chip business to AMD’s x86 chips—but no one is scoffing at the possibility these days. The reality is that IBM will never reach the volume necessary to be the No. 1 or No. 2 player in its segment. It’s not even i... » read more

Look Who’s Making Chips


The entry into the chip business by companies such as Apple, and possibly Google, Amazon and a handful of others, may seem like a land grab in the semiconductor world, but the reality is that system companies have always done their own semiconductor design. Only the names have changed. IBM made its own PC processors, and it still makes them for its high-end servers. HP made chips for its PCs... » read more

We Are All Vulnerable


Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels. We are all familiar with the huge loss of personal and financial data from these establishments. A lot more people are fuming over the data being accessed by the NSA. While we only know the details as leaked by Edward Snowden, this has to be the biggest data breach in history with the government having hacked into the data centers of Google, Yahoo and who knows ... » read more

Enabling Wearable Electronics In The Internet of Things (IoT) Era


As part of its growth focus for Applied Materials, the Office of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) aims to do the following: Identify, incubate and commercialize growth opportunities in new and adjacent markets Build a culture of open innovation at Applied Materials Address market inflections and high value problems through differentiated solutions Shape the future of our growth mark... » read more

Power Shift


The disaggregation of the mobile market, which began with Nokia, Ericsson and RIM challenging the entrenched position of Motorola back in the late 1990s, is shifting again. This time it’s being driven by a different kind of power play, namely physical power issues inside a device. The biggest problem in shrinking die and pushing economies of scale in conjunction with Moore’s Law is relat... » read more

Quantum Computer Race Heats Up


For years, there has been an intense race among various nations to develop the world’s fastest supercomputers. The U.S. and Japan led the field until 2010, when China stunned the market and rolled out the world’s fastest supercomputer. And today, China continues to lead the field with a supercomputer capable of running at speeds of 33.86 petaflops per second. While the supercomputer race... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 8


How do you choose an embedded operating system—and do you even need one? Mentor’s Colin Walls looks at the options, and the reason why there are no simple answers. Cadence’s Richard Goering has evidence that Facebook is gaining in popularity for engineer. He’s not the first person to recognize this shift, but the big unanswered questions are, ‘What’s the average age of those use... » read more

GlobalFoundries Names New CEO


Sanjay Jha, a former executive at Motorola Mobility and Qualcomm, has been named as the new chief executive of GlobalFoundries. In the position, Jha replaces Ajit Manocha, who served as CEO for the silicon foundry vendor since 2011. Manocha, who was an advisor to the company’s largest shareholder prior to being appointed CEO, will return to that role and will work closely with Jha on his ... » read more

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