Nvidia to Buy Mellanox for $6.9B


Nvidia reached a definitive agreement to acquire Mellanox Technologies for $125 a share in cash, giving the deal an enterprise value of about $6.9 billion. The proposed transaction would complement Nvidia’s product portfolio in high-performance computing for applications in artificial intelligence and big data analytics, with Mellanox’s specialty in providing interconnects for hyperscale da... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers How bad is the slowdown in the IC industry? The memory market is terrible, while other markets are slowing. One company—Renesas--is feeling the brunt. Citing the IC slowdown, Renesas will temporarily halt production at 13 of the company's 14 production facilities, according to a report from Nikkei. Renesas confirmed the move. “Renesas is considering implementing measures to ... » read more

The Next Spoiler Alert


Speculative execution seemed like a good idea at the time. As the power/performance benefits of each node shrink began to dwindle, companies like Intel figured out ways to maintain processor speeds at the same or lower power. There were other approaches, as well. Speculative execution and branch prediction are roughly equivalent to pre-fetch in search, which has gotten so good that often the... » read more

Next Wave Of Security For IIoT


A rush of new products and services promise to make the famously un-secured Industrial IoT (IIoT) substantially more secure in the near future. Although the semiconductor industry has been churning out a variety of security-related products and concepts, ranging from root of trust approaches to crypto processors and physically unclonable functions, most IIoT operations have been slow to adop... » read more

The Other Side Of Makimoto’s Wave


Custom hardware is undergoing a huge resurgence across a variety of new applications, pushing the semiconductor industry to the other side of Makimoto's Wave. Tsugio Makimoto, the technologist who identified the chip industry’s 10-year cyclical swings between standardization and customization, predicted there always will be room in ASICs for general-purpose processors. But it's becoming mo... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 6


Synopsys' Snigdha Dua traces the evolution of memory from SDRAM to DDR5 and the techniques that provide each generation's speed increase. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges of 112Gbps SerDes, including what makes PAM4 signaling different from NRZ and what goes into equalization and modeling. Mentor's Rich Edelman provides a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom UVM report... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Yingzi Technology of Guangzhou, China, has developed a “future pig farm” to demonstrate what technology can do to make keeping pigs more profitable in a country that is trying to reduce the number of small farms raising pigs and consolidate them into larger operations. China is also contending with an outbreak of African swine fever that has spread out of the country thr... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers IC Insights has released the process technology roadmaps for chipmakers and foundries. GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung, SMIC, TSMC and UMC are highlighted. GlobalFoundries has announced that the company’s 8SW RF SOI technology has delivered more than a $1 billion of client design win revenue since its launch in 2017. RF SOI is designed for RF switches and other devices in 4G/... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Cattle ranchers in Australia are using solar-powered ear tags to keep track of their herds, connecting through LoRa technology to locate their bulls, cows, heifers, and steers. SODAQ of the Netherlands and Lacuna Space of the U.K. are providing the Internet of Things technology and satellite-based LoRa connectivity to make this possible. “The main differentiator for LoRa o... » read more

5 Top Storylines For NAND Biz


2019 is expected to be a busy, if not difficult, year in the NAND flash memory market. Vendors will continue to ramp up 3D NAND, the successor to traditional 2D or planar NAND. Then, over the last year, prices for NAND have dropped with oversupply in the market. What’s in store in 2019? Vendors are expected to rush out their next-generation products. Then, there is a debate whether the... » read more

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