Chip Industry Week in Review


Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology proposed a new EUV litho technology using only four reflective mirrors and a new method of illumination optics that it claims will use 1/10 the power and cost half as much as existing EUV technology from ASML. Applied Materials may not receive expected U.S. funding to build a $4 billion research facility in Sunnyvale, CA, due to internal government... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers China’s Tsinghua Unigroup is in trouble. The group is the parent company of China’s YMTC, a 3D NAND supplier, and other chip ventures. It is close to moving into bankruptcy proceedings. Now, a consortium led by Alibaba has emerged as the frontrunner to take over Tsinghua Unigroup, according to a report from Bloomberg. That deal would keep the company afloat, the report said. ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center, and back Arm shared new features and some design wins for its Neoverse V1 and N2 platforms, which it introduced in September 2020. Neoverse V1 is optimized for high-performance computing. Arm has licensing wins from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for its exascale HPC project; and European exascale comp... » read more

AMD Wants An FPGA Company, Too


AMD signed a definitive agreement to acquire Xilinx for $35 billion in stock, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle against Intel in nearly all major markets. But there's more to this acquisition than just keeping up with AMD's arch-competitor. To begin with, the acquisition has a big impact on the programmable logic market. The only pure-play FPGA vendors left are Lattice, Achronix, a... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Rambus finalized its acquisition of the silicon IP, secure protocols and provisioning business from Verimatrix, formerly Inside Secure, for $45 million at closing, and up to an additional $20 million, subject to certain revenue targets in 2020. RISC-V SiFive unveiled two new product families. The SiFive Apex processor cores target mission-critical processors with Size, Weight, and Power (SW... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Foxconn is in talks to build a fab in Zhuhai, China, according to a report from Nikkei. The fab, to cost $9 billion, would make chips for Foxconn and outside companies, the report said, which says the company will enter the foundry business. The European Commission has approved funding for 1.75 billion euros ($2 billion) of public investment for projects in the microelectronics... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers GlobalFoundries said that it is putting its 7nm finFET program on hold indefinitely and has dropped plans to pursue technology nodes beyond 7nm. To be sure, it was a tough decision by GF to put 7nm on hold. But generally, analysts believe that GF made the right decision. “There’s only a handful of semiconductor companies that will require high-volume 7nm technology right when... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC has reduced its outlook for 2018 revenue and capital spending, according to Bloomberg. The company blamed the outlook on sluggish “mobile and digital currency mining demand,” according to the report. Samsung has developed the industry’s first 10nm-class 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM. The 8Gb LPDDR5 boasts a data rate of up to 6,400 megabits-per-second (Mb/s), which is 1.5 tim... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Cadence and National Instruments are teaming up with the aim of improving the semiconductor development and test process. The two companies are jointly working on common transistor models to ensure consistent simulation behavior between NI AWR Microwave Office circuit design software and the Cadence Spectre simulation platform. Cadence also launched the Virtuoso RF Solution for ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Christopher Rolland, an analyst at Susquehanna International, expects to see more merger and acquisition activity in the IC industry heading into 2018. “M&A activity slowed in 2017, but the year is going out with a bang!” Rolland said in a recent research note. Towards the end of 2017, for example, Broadcom made a bid for Qualcomm, while Marvell announced intent to buy Cavium. ... » read more

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