A Crisis In DoD’s Trusted Foundry Program?


The U.S. Department of Defense’s Trusted Foundry program is in flux due to GlobalFoundries’ recent decision to put 7nm on hold, raising national security concerns across the U.S. defense community. U.S. DoD and military/aerospace chip customers currently have access to U.S.-based “secure” foundry capacity down to 14nm, but that's where it ends. No other foundries provide similar “s... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Amid ongoing delays with its 10nm process, Intel has reorganized its manufacturing unit, according to a report from The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sohail Ahmed, who has jointly led the unit since 2016, will retire next month, according to the report. The industry is racing to put extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography into production. TSMC recently taped-out its first 7nm chip using E... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things At Arm TechCon, Arm unveiled its Neoverse brand identity, providing an infrastructure foundation for 5G, the Internet of Things, edge computing, and other applications. The Arm Neoverse IP will proliferate next year from Arm and its technology partners. With Arm’s “Ares” platform, to be introduced in 2019, the company promises to deliver 30% per-generation performance ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm announced its new roadmap promising 30% annual system performance gains on leading edge nodes through 2021. These gains are to come from a combination of microarchitecture design to hardware, software and tools. They are branding this new roadmap 'Neoverse.' The first delivery will be Ares – expected in early 2019 – for a 7nm IP platform targeting 5G networks and next-generation cloud t... » read more

RISC-V: More Than a Core


The open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is attracting a lot of attention across the semiconductor industry, but its long-term success will depend on levels of cooperation never seen before in the semiconductor industry. The big question now is how committed the industry is to RISC-V's success. The real value that RISC-V brings is the promise of an ecosystem and the opportun... » read more

Defect Challenges Growing In Advanced Packaging


The current defect inspection systems for packaging are running out of steam for the latest advanced packages, prompting the need for new tools in the market. In response, several vendors are rolling out new defect inspection systems for use in various advanced packages, such as 2.5D/3D technologies and fan-out. The new defect inspection systems are more capable than the previous tools, but ... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things IBM this week launched the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, which combines artificial intelligence, Internet of Things technology, and cloud-based offerings, providing insights to farmers through a managed service. Among other features, growers can deploy drones to send photos to the IBM Cloud for AI-based trend analysis and detection of crop diseases. The platform ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Sept. 25


Simulating quarks and gluons The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is simulating sub-atomic particles on the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The system is simulating these particles at speeds over 70 times faster than the predecessor. More specifically, Oak Ridge is simulating quarks and gluons on the recently-announced Summit supercomputer. In simple terms,... » read more

The Security Penalty


It's not clear if Meltdown, Spectre and Foreshadow caused actual security breaches, but they did prompt big processor vendors like Intel, Arm, AMD and IBM to fix these vulnerabilities before they were made public by Google's Project Zero. While all of this may make data center managers and consumers feel better in one respect, it has created a level of panic of a different sort. For decades,... » read more

Hybrid Memory


Gary Bronner, senior vice president of Rambus Labs, talks about the future of DRAM scaling, why one type of memory won’t solve all needs, and what the pros and cons are of different memories. https://youtu.be/R0hhDx2Fb7Q » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →