Startup Funding: Q2 2024


AI drew more investors to the chip industry in Q2. Four AI-focused chip startups receiving rounds of more than $100 million, targeting data center ASICs for transformers, highly flexible platforms for the embedded edge, dataflow processors, and mixed-signal neuromorphic chips. In-memory computing also helped boost AI, with three companies either incorporating it into their chips or providing sp... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan. The Japanese government approved $3.9 billion in funding for chipmaker Rapidus to expand its foundry business, of which 10% will be invested in advanced packaging. This is in addition to the previously announced $2.18 billion in funding. In a meeting next week, the U.S. and Japan are expected to cooperate on increasing semiconductor development a... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, Nordic, and Bosch are jointly investing in a new RISC-V company, to be formed in Germany, that will speed up RISC-V’s adoption in commercial products. The company will be “a single source to enable compatible RISC-V based products, provide reference architectures, and help establish solutions widely used in the industry,” according to a press release. The co... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is expected to list solely on a U.S. stock exchange when it goes public again later this year, forgoing the London Stock Exchange for now, the BBC reports. Global investment banks expect the offering to value the company between $30 billion and $70 billion, according to Bloomberg. Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for cont... » read more

AI ASICs Will Become Increasingly Application-Specific


Back in 2017, I blogged about AI ASICs being not exactly ASICs. One of the primary reasons for not calling AI acceleration chips ASIC is because historically ASIC or Application Specific Integrated Circuit has referred to a fixed hardware block with limited programmability. AI ASICs on the other hand offer significant programming via frameworks such as Tensorflow and the point was that they are... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


IP, design Arm unveiled a number of new CPUs and GPUs. Based on the Armv9 architecture, the Cortex-X3 aims to improve single-threaded performance and targets a range of benchmarks and applications. The Cortex-A715 focuses on efficient performance, delivering a 20% energy efficiency gain and 5% performance uplift compared to Cortex-A710. In addition, the Cortex-A510 and DSU-110 were updated to ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility The Lancet’s Road Safety 2022 report estimates that 1.35 million people die every year from road traffic injuries, with more than 50 million injured or disabled. Low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) have the most deaths, accounting for 93% of the world's fatalities on roads. The four main risk factors for road injuries are speeding, impaired driving (drunk driv... » read more

Ensuring Functional Safety For Automotive AI Processors


Safety is critically important across the automotive, industrial, and aerospace and defense industries. For instance, Cadence's work with Hailo illustrates how advances in semiconductor technology and EDA deliver safe electronics without compromising low power and cost. Hailo's automotive webpage starts with the words "The pursuit for 'vision zero,'" reflecting that European road fatalitie... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


NASA plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this Saturday, Dec 25, on an European Space Agency (ESA) rocket. Mission-critical radiation-hardened components from IR HiRel, an Infineon company, will go up with the JWST. IR HiRel space-grade DC-DC converters, rad hard MOSFETs and other power control products are in the spacecraft bus subsystems, such as electrical power, altitude co... » read more

Startup Funding: October 2021


Semiconductor manufacturing and packaging companies caught the attention of investors last month, with funding going to a middle-end-of-line foundry, flexible electronics manufacturer, and fab management software. Two Israeli startups are approaching AI accelerators in very different ways, while battery startups propose a variety of new chemistries in the search for the ideal electric vehicle b... » read more

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