Test Moving Forward And Backward


Test, once considered an important but rather mundane way of separating good chips from the not-so-good and the total rejects, is taking on a whole new life. After decades of largely living in the shadows behind design and advancements in materials and lithography, test has quietly shifted into a much more critical and more public role. But it has taken several rather significant shifts acro... » read more

May’19 Startup Funding: Mega-Funding Rounds Continue


In May, 20 startups enjoyed the distinction of getting a mega-round of $100 million or more in private funding. Those 20 companies together took in more than $6.65 billion. There were two billion-dollar investments in recent weeks. GM Cruise, the autonomous vehicle startup, received $1.15 billion in new funding from General Motors, Honda Motor, the SoftBank Vision Fund, T. Rowe Price Asso... » read more

System Bits: May 14


Faster U.S. supercomputers on the way The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a contract for more than $600 million to Cray for an exascale supercomputer to be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during 2021. Cray will provide its Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect for what is dubbed the Frontier supercomputer. Advanced Micro Devices will have a key role in building the... » read more

Creating A Roadmap For Hardware Security


The U.S. Department of Defense and private industry consortiums are developing comprehensive and cohesive cybersecurity plans that will serve as blueprints for military, industrial and commercial systems. What is particularly noteworthy in all of these efforts is the focus on semiconductors. While software can be patched, vulnerabilities such as Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow need to be de... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Smart-building technology is a factor in marketing new facilities to prospective tenants. The new Cambridge Crossing development in Cambridge, Mass., aspires to attract tech-oriented tenants much like nearby Kendall Square, this analysis notes. Philips has agreed to lease seven floors in Cambridge Crossing’s first office building, making that location its North American he... » read more

Preparing For War On The Edge


War clouds are gathering over the edge of the network. The rush by the reigning giants of data—IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft and Apple—to control the cloud by building mammoth hyperscale data centers  is being met with uncertainty at the edge of the network. In fact, just the emergence of the edge could mean that all bets are off when it comes to data dominance. It... » read more

Spreading Intelligence From The Cloud To The Edge


The challenge of partitioning processing between the edge and the cloud is beginning to come into focus as chipmakers and systems companies wrestle with a massive and rapidly growing volume of data. There are widely different assessments of how much data this ultimately will include, but everyone agrees it is a very large number. Petabytes are simply rounding errors in this equation, and tha... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Second-tier cities in the U.S. that can’t attract projects like the Amazon HQ2 are welcoming the testing of autonomous vehicles, smart city technology, and advanced surveillance techniques, this analysis notes. What do they get in return? Much of the time, little or nothing. And bad things can happen. People have been throwing objects at Waymo vehicles in Chandler, Ariz., ... » read more

EUV Arrives, But More Issues Ahead


EUV has arrived. After decades of development and billions of dollars of investment, EUV lithography is taking center stage at the world’s leading fabs. More than 20 years after ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography research program began, and nearly a decade after its first pre-production exposure tools, the company expects to deliver 30 EUV exposure systems in 2019. That is nearly doubl... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Apple purchased a portfolio of eight granted and pending patents that belonged to Lighthouse AI, a smart home security camera startup that ceased operations near the end of 2018. The portfolio was acquired at about the same time, according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; financial terms weren’t revealed. Also not disclosed, as usual, is what Apple will do with t... » read more

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