The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers and OEMs Samsung NEXT, formerly called the Samsung Global Innovation Center, has announced the creation of the Samsung NEXT Fund, a $150 million venture capital investment fund. The idea is to fund early stage startups. What’s next in consumer electronics? At CES 2017, Samsung unveiled a wide range of new products, such as quantum dot TVs, smart appliances, gaming laptops and s... » read more

Prioritizing Vehicle Data Traffic


It’s no surprise to hear that data complexity is on the rise inside vehicles today, but the scale just might cause you to gag on your coffee. It's expected that a fully connected car will upload as much as 30 gigabytes of data to the cloud every hour. Given the scale of data, it is imperative to make sure every bit of it is classified and tagged properly so that the subsystems, and inf... » read more

Making Secure Chips For IoT Devices


Chips and modules going into Internet of Things node devices must have cybersecurity features designed and built into them. Multiple vendors are responding with products meant to keep the IoT devices protected from the cyberattacks that are becoming more common. While [getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"] privacy remains a key concern for consumers and homeowners, IoT security has taken on top-of-mi... » read more

Looking Back On IoT In 2016


The Internet of Things was going great guns for most of 2016. Until October 21, that is. That’s the date of the coordinated cyberattacks on Dyn, an Internet performance management services firm. The distributed denial-of-service attacks quickly had impacts on Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Twitter, and other popular websites. Dyn was able to fight off the aggressive att... » read more

BEOL Issues At 10nm And 7nm (part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss problems with the back end of line at leading-edge nodes with Craig Child, senior manager and deputy director for [getentity id="22819" e_name="GlobalFoundries'"] advanced technology development integration unit; Paul Besser, senior technology director at [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"]; David Fried, CTO at [getentity id="22210" e_name... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Analysis Amazon Web Services has 81 services for its customers in the Internet of Things, online video games, and other markets, Quentin Hardy notes in this analysis. AWS is competing with Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform in cloud computing services, which are now extending beyond data centers and servers to offer software and a multitude of online services. “As innovations like... » read more

CEO Outlook: Chip Design 2017


After two consecutive flat to slightly down years, the semiconductor industry is poised for growth in 2017. Cowan this month predicted 4.7% growth in semiconductor sales in 2017, while World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) put that figure at 3.3%. And last month, International Business Strategies (IBS) pegged the number at 4.6%, according to statistics compiled by the Global Semiconduc... » read more

Foundries See Mixed Future


Amid a tumultuous business environment, the silicon foundry industry is projected to see steady growth in a number of process segments in 2017. As in past years, the foundry market is expected to grow faster than the overall IC industry in 2017. But at the same time, the IC industry—the foundry customer base—continues to witness a frenetic wave of merger and acquisition activity. Basical... » read more

Green Computing: GPUs Strike Back


After the last Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference in June, I wrote an article here about how the custom designed chips from NRCPC (used in the Sunway TaihuLight) and PEZY Computing (used in the PEZY Shoubu) had jumped to the top of the Green500 list with the Sunway TaihuLight also remarkably topping the Top500 list. Well, six months after the report from the IEEE/ACM SC16 Con... » read more

Uncertainty Grows For 5nm, 3nm


As several chipmakers ramp up their 10nm finFET processes, with 7nm just around the corner, R&D has begun for 5nm and beyond. In fact, some are already moving full speed ahead in the arena. [getentity id="22586" comment="TSMC"] recently announced plans to build a new fab in Taiwan at a cost of $15.7 billion. The proposed fab is targeted to manufacture TSMC’s 5nm and 3nm processes, whic... » read more

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