Startup Funding: July 2023

By Jesse Allen - 02 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Investors pumped more than $2.8 billion into 123 companies July. It was a particularly strong month for photonics companies, with a photonic integrated circuit foundry raising more than $100 million. Startups this month also are using photonic technology in innovative ways. This includes an all-optical RISC processor, biomarker identification, faster fully homomorphic encryption, and more AI... » read more

Startup Funding: June 2023

By Jesse Allen - 10 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 0

June saw several large funding rounds, with seven of at least $100 million. Over half a billion dollars alone went to a Chinese company manufacturing silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors. The wide band gap material has seen steady interest from investors, particularly for its potential use in electric vehicles. Another of the month's mega-rounds went to a company designing RISC-V SoCs ... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2023

By Jesse Allen - 03 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

Packaging was a hot spot in April, with one of the largest rounds going to a middle-end-of-line advanced packaging company. A second packaging company also drew significant funding for its focus on wafer-level packaging for CMOS image sensors. Two packaging substrate manufacturers also saw investment. Two photoresist makers also drew sizeable rounds. Both they and the packaging companies are... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2023

By Jesse Allen - 08 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

The cost of borrowing is going up, but investors continued to pour money into the chip industry in February. Collectively, 132 companies raised more than $4.5 billion last month. One of the big beneficiaries was quantum computing, with nine companies drawing a total of more than $500 million. The bulk of that went to a quantum software and services company spun out of Alphabet, but plenty wa... » read more

Startup Funding: October 2022

By Jesse Allen - 02 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Investors poured $3.5 billion into 113 startup companies in October 2022, especially new battery technology, AI hardware, and faster memory access. Battery technology dominated the fundraising in October thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy and four funding rounds that exceeded $200M. The DOE awarded sizeable grants to help 20 companies, including six startups, build out battery material ... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2022

By Jesse Allen - 04 May, 2022 - Comments: 0

Silicon photonics holds the potential to vastly increase bandwidth in chips and systems while reducing power use — and investors are taking note. In April, one of the largest funding rounds went to a startup developing chip-to-chip optical I/O. But that wasn't all. Photonics funding showed up in AI with a photonic Tensor core, in room-temperature quantum computing, and, of course, in lidar an... » read more

Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

New AI Processors Architectures Balance Speed With Efficiency

Hot Chips 24: Large language models ratchet up pressure for sustainable computing and heterogeneous integration; data management becomes key differentiator.