The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Packaging and test A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME) has formed a fan-out wafer-level packaging consortium comprising of OSATs, materials vendors, equipment suppliers and others. The group is called the FOWLP Development Line Consortium. As part of the announcement, Singapore’s IME has established a development line to accelerate the development of fan-out. Located in IME’s... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP Cryptographic flaws have been discovered in the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting IP and managing access rights. A team from the University of Florida found "a surprising number of cryptographic mistakes in the standard. In the most egregious cases, these mistakes enable attack vectors that allow us to recover the entire underlying plaintext IP." The researchers warn that an adversary coul... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers UMC has appointed two senior vice presidents--S.C. Chien and Jason Wang--as co-presidents of the company, following Po-Wen Yen’s retirement as UMC’s CEO. The co-presidents are accountable for the overall performance of UMC. They will report to UMC Chairman Stan Hung. Chien will focus on the core manufacturing and technology aspects of UMC, including R&D and operations. Wang wil... » read more

DAC Day Two: Down To Business


DAC day two started with a breakfast presentation put on by Synopsys which included guests from ARM, TSMC and HiSilicon. It was titled Collaborating to Enable Design with the latest processors and finFET processes. Collaboration is a word that we hear increasingly when talking about the advanced nodes and today we are truly at the point where one company cannot do it all. Ron Moore, VP of ma... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics uncorked the latest version of its Catapult high-level synthesis platform, adding a formal-based C Property Checker tool to automatically identify and formally prove hard-to-find issues like uninitialized memory, divide by 0, and array bounds errors in the users' HLS C++/SystemC model. IP ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors. According to ARM, the g... » read more

What Will China Do Next?


China's attempts to buy up U.S. chip companies is undergoing more gyrations, this time spurred by the exchange rate set by the People's Bank of China and the U.S. Federal Reserve's expected interest rate hikes. The central bank dropped the exchange rate of the yuan versus the dollar to its lowest rate since 2011, according to Bloomberg. The current rate is now 6.55 yuan per dollar, compared ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights released its top chip makers in terms of sales for the first quarter of 2016. The top-20 ranking includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and UMC) and six fabless companies. Intel remained in the top spot, followed in order by Samsung and TSMC. The biggest movers in the ranking were made by the new Broadcom (Avago/Broadcom) and Nvidia. Broadcom jumped f... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) and GlobalFoundries announced the establishment of a new Advanced Patterning and Productivity Center (APPC). The $500 million, 5-year program will accelerate the introduction of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technologies into manufacturing. The center is located at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany, N.Y. -------... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Qualcomm recently announced the new Snapdragon 820. The cell-phone chipset is based on Samsung Electronics’ new 14nm LPP (Low-Power Plus) process, the second-generation of the company’s 14nm finFET process technology. What’s next? Qualcomm is developing the Snapdragon 830. “Snapdragon 830 leaks indicate that the chip will sport 8GB of RAM, an enhanced Kryo custom architecture, and fabbe... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Synopsys unveiled its comprehensive standard cell library characterization and QA solution, SiliconSmart ADV, highlighting a simple multi-core licensing scheme for easy adaptation to constantly changing characterization workload requirements. Cadence updated its Sigrity portfolio focusing on multi-gigabit interfaces, including automated support for IBIS-AMI model creation, channel m... » read more

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