FAA Traffic Management Anticipates Flying Cars


It may be a year or more before the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) changes its rules enough for Amazon or other hopefuls to deliver products by drones. But the five-year FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, signed into law Oct. 5, confirmed controversial rules the FAA considers critical to its ability to regulate drone traffic and confirmed funding and plans for drone-specific additi... » 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

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers GlobalFoundries has announced the addition of nine new partners to its RFwave Partner Program, including AkronIC, Ask Radio, Catena, University of Waterloo Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS), Giga Solution, Helic, Incize, Mentor Graphics and Xpeedic Technology. The RFwave Partner Program builds upon GF’s radio-frequency (RF) efforts. The new partners will pro... » read more

Reliability, Machine Learning And Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss reliability, resilience, machine learning and advanced packaging with Rahul Goyal, vice president in the technology and manufacturing group at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor business unit at ANSYS; and Lluis Paris, director of IP portfolio marketing at TSMC. What follows ar... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 10


In a video, Cadence's Megha Daga dives into sparsity in neural networks and how it affects bandwidth, performance, and power efficiency. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls takes a look at efficient embedded code, and why that means different things at different times. Synopsys' Eric Huang argues that in the realm of video standards, HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB Type-C are set to continue comp... » 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

RISC-V Inches Toward The Center


RISC-V is pushing further into the mainstream, showing up across a wide swath of designs and garnering support from a long and still-growing list of chipmakers, tools vendors, universities and foundries. In most cases it is being used as a complementary processor than a replacement for something else, but that could change in the future. What makes RISC-V particularly attractive to chipmaker... » read more

What Will Intel Do Next?


The writing is on the wall for big processor makers. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are developing their own processors. In addition, there are more than 30 startups developing various types of AI accelerators, as well as a field of embedded FPGA vendors, a couple of discrete FPGA makers, and a slew of soft processor cores. This certainly hasn't been lost on Intel. As the world's largest... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 26


VLSI Research's Dan Hutcheson chats with GlobalFoundries CEO Tom Caulfield about the company's changing strategy, how the company got to its present point, and how many companies will be using leading edge technologies. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks for what's changed (or not) for the state of software security and breach disclosure regulations in the year since the massive Equifax data b... » read more

EUV Pellicle, Uptime And Resist Issues Continue


Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is moving closer to realization, but several problems involving scanner uptime, photoresists and pellicles need to be resolved before this long-overdue technology is put into full production. Intel, Samsung and TSMC are hoping to insert EUV into production at 7nm and/or 5nm. While the remaining issues don’t necessarily pre-empt using EUV, they do affec... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →