The Week In Review: IoT


Products Qualcomm reported before the official opening of CES 2017 that it has shipped more than 1 billion Internet of Things chips to date, for such applications as automotive electronics, Internet-connected televisions, sensors, and wearable gadgets (including smartwatches). The company didn’t include chips for smartphones and tablet computers in that total. “We have scale,” said Raj T... » read more

What’s Missing In Advanced Packaging


Even though Moore's Law is running out of steam, there is still a need to increase functional density. Increasingly, this is being done with heterogeneous integration at the package or module level. This is proving harder than it looks. At this point there are no standardized methodologies, and tools often are retrofitted versions of existing tools that don't take into account the challenges... » read more

Chip Advances Play Big Role In Cloud


Semiconductor engineering teams have been collaborating with key players in the data center ecosystem in recent years, resulting in unforeseen and substantial changes in how data centers are architected and built. That includes everything from which boxes, boards, cards and cables go where, to how much it costs to run them. The result is that bedrock communication technology and standards li... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung Austin Semiconductor plans to invest more than $1 billion in its fab in Austin, Texas. Today, the fab continues to ramp up the company’s 14nm finFET technology. At the same time, Samsung is expanding its advanced finFET foundry process technology offerings with its fourth-generation 14nm process (14LPU) and its third-generation 10nm technology (10LPU). Graphcore is developing a so-... » read more

Silicon Photonics Comes Into Focus


Silicon photonics is attracting growing attention and investment as a companion technology to copper wiring inside of data centers, raising new questions about what comes next and when. Light has always been the ultimate standard for speed. It requires less energy to move large quantities of data, generates less heat than electricity, and it can work equally well over long or short distances... » read more

Gaps In The Verification Flow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of the functional verification flow with Stephen Bailey, director of emerging companies at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; [getperson id="11079" comment="Anupam Bakshi"], CEO of [getentity id="22168" e_name="Agnisys"]; [getperson id="11124" comment="Mike Bartley"], CEO of [getentity id="22868" e_name="Test and Verification... » read more

Sorting Out Next-Gen Memory


In the data center and related environments, high-end systems are struggling to keep pace with the growing demands in data processing. There are several bottlenecks in these systems, but one segment that continues to receive an inordinate amount of attention, if not part of the blame, is the memory and storage hierarchy. [getkc id="92" kc_name="SRAM"], the first tier of this hierarchy, is... » read more

Focus Shifts To Architectures


Chipmakers increasingly are relying on architectural and micro-architectural changes as the best hope for improving power and performance across a spectrum of markets, process nodes and price points. While discussion about the death of [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] predates the 1-micron process node, there is no question that it is getting harder for even the largest chipmakers to st... » read more

Joint R&D Has Its Ups And Downs


As corporate spending on research and development dwindles, enterprises are reaching out to colleges and universities to supplement their R&D. And they often are finding eager partners in those endeavors, as professors and their graduate students look for help, financial and technical, in addressing long-term research projects. “Pure research is just a luxury no one can afford anymore,... » read more

Stepping Back From Scaling


Architectures, packaging and software are becoming core areas for semiconductor research and development, setting the stage for a series of shifts that will impact a large swath of the semiconductor industry. While there is still demand from the largest chipmakers for increased density at the next process node, the underlying economics for foundries, equipment vendors and IP developers are f... » read more

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