What Engineers Are Reading And Watching


By Brian Bailey And Ed Sperling An important indicator of where the chip industry is heading is what engineers are reading and what videos they are watching. While some subjects remain on top, such as the level of interest in the latest manufacturing technologies, other areas come and go. The stories with the biggest traffic numbers are almost identical to last year. Readers want to know wh... » read more

The Growing Challenges Of 5G Reliability


The test field is getting more complicated as chips become larger, more heterogeneous, and subject to almost constant changes. Nowhere is this more evident than in 5G, where standards are still evolving and use cases are still being defined. Without passing test, no technology advances. But those definitions are subject to change, and they can change again over time. The communications in... » read more

Cadence To Buy NI’s AWR Unit For $160M


Cadence signed a deal to buy National Instruments' AWR business unit for about $160 million in cash, a move that Cadence describes as a way to broaden its market into intelligent system design. AWR's strength is high-frequency RF design automation tools, particularly in the millimeter wave and microwave spectrums, which are critical for radar and 5G. Both of those technologies are expected t... » read more

New Challenges In Testing 5G Devices


Alejandro Buritica, senior solutions marketing manager at National Instruments, talks about what will be needed for mass-market testing of 5G devices, how to focus signals to overcome signal attenuation, and how to make over-the-air testing viable where leads are not exposed. » read more

System Bits: Sept. 11


Everything’s faster in Texas The Frontera supercomputing system was formally unveiled last week at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The system was deployed in June on the University of Texas at Austin campus. It is the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world at present and the world's fastest academic supercomputer. Dell EMC and Intel collaborated on fitting out Frontera. Work beg... » read more

Ensuring A 5G Design Is Viable


Ron Squiers, network solutions specialist at Mentor, a Siemens Business, explains what’s different in 5G chips versus 4G, how to construct a front haul and back haul system so it is testable in the network stack. » read more

On The Cusp Of 5G


Carriers and chipmakers are celebrating the rollout of the first standards-compliant commercial 5G services. "We are, officially in the era of 5G," said John Smee, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm at the recent 5G Summit at IEEE's International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in Boston. Movement is happening on the commercial end. Major U.S. carriers Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have set ... » read more

Solving 5G’s Thorniest Issues


5G rollouts are beginning to hit the market, accompanied by a long list of unsolved technical and business issues surrounding this next-generation wireless technology. But progress is being made on some of the key challenges facing this technology, even though not all of those solutions will be in place at launch. The real challenges are with millimeter-wave implementations of 5G, which oper... » read more

Challenges Grow For 5G Packages And Modules


The shift to 5G wireless networks is driving a need for new IC packages and modules in smartphones and other systems, but this move is turning out to be harder than it looks. For one thing, the IC packages and RF modules for 5G phones are more complex and expensive than today's devices, and that gap will grow significantly in the second phase of 5G. In addition, 5G devices will require an as... » read more

Where 5G Works, And Where It Doesn’t


The rollout of 5G hype has begun. Companies are building 5G chipsets for mobile devices, and they are working on the infrastructure that will allow massive amounts of data to move freely between devices. There is little doubt that more bandwidth is required everywhere. Files are growing in size, particularly with streaming video and images and various flavors of AI and machine learning. This... » read more

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