A Primer For The 802.XX Physical Layer


This is the second installment of the 802.XX for the IoE series of articles. The first one was published in the August issue and addressed the Media Access Control (MAC) layer. In this article, we will examine the elements of the physical (PHY) layer of the 802.11 protocol stack. For reference, the protocol stack is shown in figure 1. The best designs, like everything else, are built on a so... » read more

Challenges At Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss finFETs, 22nm FD-SOI and how the how the market will segment over the next few years with Marie Semeria, CEO of [getentity id="22192" e_name="Leti"]; Patrick Soheili, vice president of product management and corporate development at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Paul Boudre, CEO of Soitec; and Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global ... » read more

Explosion Of Creativity


One of Steve Jobs' great revelations occurred while watching his young daughter use a computer with a graphical user interface. He observed that adults ask how to use a computer, whereas children ask what you can do with it. The semiconductor industry is experiencing one of those seminal moments with the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything. While work continues to ensure that electrons... » read more

IoT’s 3 Big Demands On The Semiconductor Industry


Sometime in the last decade or two, whenever you signed up for your first cell phone contract, you became an untethered node in the electronic data network. Of course no one was talking about IoT then, but the trend – machine-to-machine communication and basic computation, often independent of human input – was already well underway. (What else but an early instantiation of IoT was the hand... » read more

802.XX And The IoE


Ever since the first 802.11 standard was published in 1997, it has evolved to become the de facto protocol for much of the wireless networking across a wide range of devices and implementations. Today the protocol family includes 802.b 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac, respectively. Some of these will play a very important role in the IoE. There are other 802.xx protocols (such as 802.15... » read more

Tech Talk: Sensor Design


NXP's Wouter Sijm talks about sensor design in the IoT age, where engineers can go astray, and why the IoT is a more complex environment for sensors than previous devices. [youtube vid=7fqEatgvZnE] » 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

IIoT Comes To Chip Manufacturing


Nicholas Ward, director of marketing for the services group at Applied Materials, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how data needs to be shared in semiconductor manufacturing and why it's so slow to happen in this industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we with the [getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"] and the [getkc id="78" kc_name="IIoT"]? War... » read more

How Much Security Is Enough?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the current state of [getkc id="223" kc_name="security"] and what must be done in the future, with Denis Noël, head of cyber security solutions at [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"]; Serge Leef, vice president of new ventures at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Andreas Kuehlman, senior vice president and general manager of the soft... » read more

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