Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Jesse Allen, and Liz Allan The U.S. government will provide about $162 million in federal incentives, under the CHIPS and Science Act, to help Microchip onshore its semiconductor supply chain. The move is aimed at securing a reliable domestic supply of MCUs and mature-node chips. “Today’s announcement will help propel semiconductor manufacturing projects in Colorado and O... » read more

Chip Industry Startup Funding Annual Report & Analysis: 2022


Introduction New ideas fuel the semiconductor industry, and money enables those ideas. Tracking what startups get funded is one way to see which ideas are more viable and which problems need to be solved most urgently. In general, the more startups working on a solution to a particular problem, the greater the need for a viable solution — and the more likely one will be developed. Investo... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2022


Mega-rounds dominated venture funding in February, with ten companies seeing investment of $100 million or more, five of which exceeded $200 million. Automotive was the big winner, with seven of the ten companies involved in either developing ADAS and autonomous driving, building electric vehicles, or making components to go in cars. The largest round of the month falls into that last category,... » read more

Testing More To Boost Profits


Not all chips measure up to spec, but as more data becomes available and the cost of these devices continues to rise, there is increasing momentum to salvage and re-purpose chips for other applications and markets. Performance-based binning is as old as color-banded resistors, but the practice is spreading — even for the most advanced nodes and packages. Over the last three decades, engine... » read more

Adaptive Test Gains Ground


Not all devices get tested the same way anymore, and that’s a good thing. Quality, test costs, and yield have motivated product engineers to adopt test processes that fall under the umbrella of adaptive test, which uses test data to modify a subsequent test process. But to execute such techniques requires logistics that support analysis of data, as well as enabling changes to a test based ... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Microsoft this week introduced IoT Plug and Play, a no-code toolkit for connecting Internet of Things devices to the cloud. The company touts it as a new modeling language to pump up the capabilities of IoT devices through the Microsoft Azure cloud service. The Azure IoT Device Catalog lists devices that support IoT Plug and Play, such as the STMicroelectronics SensorTile.bo... » read more

LiDAR Goes Back To The Future


LiDAR is emerging as an increasingly important piece of the enabling technology in autonomous driving, along with advanced computer vision and radar sensor chips. But LiDAR systems also are finding their way into a variety of other applications, such as industrial automation, including robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Advanced mapping is another rapidly growing market for LiDAR, which... » read more