Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools and materials Applied Materials has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kokusai Electric for $2.2 billion in cash from investment firm KKR. With the acquisition of Kokusai’s semiconductor equipment unit, Applied expands its customer base and gains a foothold in the batch processing equipment business, where a tool can process wafers in parallel. Applied’s strength is in the ... » read more

Blog Review: June 26


Arm's Krish Nathella and Dam Sunwoo dig into research to make a practical implementation of a temporal data prefetcher that overcomes the huge on- and off-chip storage and traffic overheads usually associated with them. Cadence's Paul McLellan notes that while concerns about uncover bias in computer vision algorithms usually focus on people, a team at Facebook found that object recognition t... » read more

Why Choose NI For PMUs And Wide Area Monitoring


PMUs have helped foster high speed data gathering from the grid with some utilities capturing phasor data as fast as 1 sample per cycle. As adoption and experience with PMU data grows, new possibilities emerge to help better monitor and control the dynamic health of a utility grid. PMUs built on NI technology have several advantageous features that can help utilities, power systems engineers, a... » read more

5G Drives New Test Approaches


Test/validation providers are claiming steady progress in the race to deliver 5G network components that support millimeter-wave as well as lower-frequency networks. Going from a state of no existing off-the-shelf test equipment suitable for 5G standalone new radio (NR), test companies are introducing equipment that can handle mmWave component testing on a limited scale. 5G is a next-generat... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research IC Insights has released its forecast for chips in terms of applications. Communications is still the biggest IC market, but automotive is growing the fastest. In its first forecast of artificial intelligence (AI) edge processors, International Data Corp. (IDC) estimates that worldwide shipments of AI-optimized processors for edge systems will reach 340.1 million units in 20... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Packaging and test In the rankings, ASE was the top OSAT in terms of sales in the first quarter of 2019, according to TrendForce. Amkor and JCET were next in the rankings. “Judging from the falling phone sales 1Q19 impacted by the U.S.-China trade dispute and the oversupply situation in memory markets, the total revenue of the top ten businesses in packaging and testing are predicted to st... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade More trade news: "The Trump administration is hiking duties on $200 billion worth of Chinese products to 25% from 10%," according to CNBC. The following is attributed to Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), in response to President Trump’s plan to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25%: “The president is seeking a bet... » read more

Best Practices For Saving Measurement Data


You collect data to make decisions. However, an inefficient file format may cause problems when analyzing your data. The key to choosing a file format for your application involves thinking about the current system requirements and how the file can adapt for future application needs. To help you organize your file format for your application, use the guide and checklist of questions: • Ho... » read more

5G Heats Up Base Stations


Before 5G can be deployed commercially on a large scale, engineers have to solve some stubborn problems—including how to make a hot technology a whole lot cooler. 5G-capable modem chipsets are already on the market from Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, MediaTek, Intel and Apple, with some 5G service (LTE-Advanced/LTE-Advanced Pro) available in the U.S. But still mostly missing from the 5G equati... » read more

Gaps Emerge In Automotive Test


Demands by automakers for zero defects over 18 years are colliding with real-world limitations of testing complex circuitry and interactions, and they are exposing a fundamental disconnect between mechanical and electronic expectations that could be very expensive to fix. This is especially apparent at leading-edge nodes, where much of the logic is being developed for AI systems and image se... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →