Repositioning For A Changing IC Market


Sailesh Chittipeddi, executive vice president at Renesas, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how changes in end markets are shifting demand for technology. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Renesas has acquired a number of companies over the past several years. What's the goal? Chittipeddi: The goal very simply is to create an industry leading solutio... » read more

EZ-PD PMG1 High Voltage MCU As A Coprocessor For Embedded Applications


EZ-PD™ PMG1, a family of High Voltage Microcontrollers (MCUs) with USB-C Power Delivery (PD), supports embedded firmware engineers and system designers to adopt USB-C into applications such as smart speakers, IoT hubs, home appliances, internet gateways, power and garden tools. This article targets embedded firmware engineers and system designers interested in including USB-C in their em... » read more

Mixed Outlook For Silicon Wafers


Silicon wafers are a fundamental part of the semiconductor business. Every chipmaker needs to buy them in one size or another, such as 200mm, 300mm and others. Silicon wafer vendors produce and sell bare or raw silicon wafers to chipmakers, who in turn process them into chips. So what’s in store for the silicon wafer market? Sungho Yoon, senior research manager at SEMI, sat down with Se... » read more

Manufacturing Shifts To AI Of Things


AI is being infused into the Internet of Things, setting the stage for significant improvements in manufacturing productivity, improved uptime, and reduced costs — regardless of market segment. The traditional approach to improving manufacturing equipment reliability and efficiency is regular scheduled maintenance. While that is an improvement over just fixing or replacing equipment when i... » read more

End In Sight For Chip Shortages?


The current wave of semiconductor and IC packaging shortages is expected to extend well into 2022, but there are also signs that supply may finally catch up with demand. The same is true for manufacturing capacity, materials and equipment in both the semiconductor and packaging sectors. Nonetheless, after a period of shortages in all segments, the current school of thought is that chip suppl... » read more

An FPGA-Based ECU for Remote Reconfiguration in Automotive Systems


Abstract: "Growing interest in intelligent vehicles is leading automotive systems to include numerous electronic control units (ECUs) inside. As a result, efficient implementation and management of automotive systems is gaining importance. Flexible updating and reconfiguration of ECUs is one appropriate strategy for these goals. Software updates to the ECUs are expected to improve performance ... » read more

What Is An xPU?


Almost every day there is an announcement about a new processor architecture, and it is given a three-letter acronym — TPU, IPU, NPU. But what really distinguishes them? Are there really that many unique processor architectures, or is something else happening? In 2018, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson delivered the Turing lecture entitled, "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture... » read more

Data Tsunami Pushes Boundaries Of IC Interconnects


Rapid increases in machine-generated data are fueling demand for higher-performance multi-core computing, forcing design teams to rethink the movement of data on-chip, off-chip, and between chips in a package. In the past, this was largely handled by the on-chip interconnects, which often were a secondary consideration in the design. But with the rising volumes of data in markets ranging fro... » read more

Will The Fitbit Charge 5 Outshine The Fitbit Luxe?


We don’t know, and we do not comment on whether one device is better than its previous generation. What we do is look at and compare generations of devices. And while we wait for our pre-order of our Fitbit Charge 5 to arrive, we will take a look at what Fitbit Luxe has inside of it. Fig. 1: Fitbit Luxe. Fig. 2: Fitbit Inspire 2. The Luxe has other changes from the Inspire 2, inc... » read more

Why TinyML Is Such A Big Deal


While machine-learning (ML) development activity most visibly focuses on high-power solutions in the cloud or medium-powered solutions at the edge, there is another collection of activity aimed at implementing machine learning on severely resource-constrained systems. Known as TinyML, it’s both a concept and an organization — and it has acquired significant momentum over the last year or... » read more

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