Rethinking Differentiation


Differentiation is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and in some cases much more expensive for chipmakers. The traditional metrics of faster performance, lower power and less area/cost, which are leftovers from the PC era, no longer are a guarantee of success despite the fact that they are still baseline metrics for many designs. Even new metrics such as ecosystem completeness, w... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


NuFlare Technology wants to enter a new market. The e-beam giant and NGR are jointly collaborating on a development program for next-generation electron-beam wafer inspection and metrology. It’s unclear if NuFlare is developing a single- or multi-beam tool, however. Don’t look now, but a fab tool downturn could be on the horizon. This comes amid a slowdown in PCs, tablets and smartphone... » read more

Getting Paid More


Consolidation is a regular news item in the semiconductor industry, and has been for years, but most of those deals have been relatively small. What's changing is the amount of consolidation involving big companies, fueled partly by a massive M&A fund in China, partly by an arms race in preparation for the IoE, and partly by the kind of thinking that if other companies are doing it, it's dan... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Electronics Butterfly Effect


Everyone has heard of the butterfly effect where a small change in a non-linear system can result in large difference in an outcome. For the past 40 years, the electronics industry has approximated a linear system, fed primarily by Moore’s Law. The incremental changes available at each new process node have led us to make incremental changes and improvements in many aspects of the design, its... » read more

Inside The 5G Smartphone


Amid a slowdown in the cell phone business, the market is heating up for perhaps the next big thing in wireless—5th generation mobile networks or 5G. In fact, major carriers, chipmakers and telecom equipment vendors are all rushing to get a piece of the action in 5G, which is the follow-on to the current wireless standard known as 4G or long-term evolution (LTE). Intel, Samsung and Qualcom... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In Chip Business


Shifting business models, acquisitions, minority investments and increasing uncertainty are creating fundamental shifts in the semiconductor industry that could redefine who is successful in which markets for years to come. The announcement today that [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"] is developing memory controller chips, expanding its business beyond just creating IP for the memory an... » read more

Intel Acquires Docea Power


Intel has quietly done another EDA acquisition, this time buying Docea Power, a small company based in Moirans, France. Docea had high-level power and thermal estimation tools. The acquisition closed July 31st. [getentity id="22222" comment="Docea Power"] was founded by two brothers, [getperson id="11137" p_name="Ghislain"] and [getperson id="11138" p_name="Sylvian"] Kaiser. Ghislain had spe... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Sunit Rikhi, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel and general manager of Intel’s Custom Foundry unit, has retired. “I left Intel on a sabbatical in late March and ended my career with Intel on June 1,” Rikhi said in an e-mail. Now, Rikhi has started a new company. The company, called Reach for Infinity LLC, “is a management development company devoted to... » read more

DVFS On The Sidelines


Power reduction is one of the most important aspects of chip design these days, but not all power reduction techniques are used equally. Some that were once important are fading and dynamic voltage, and frequency scaling (DVFS) is one of them. What's changed, and will we see a resurgence in the future? What is it? DVFS has physics powerfully in its favor. As Vinod Viswanath, director of res... » read more

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