Envelope Tracking Fundamentals And Test Solutions?


There was once a time when your cell phone could go for days without needing to be recharged. Today, despite the innovations in cell phone battery technology, new demands, such as more internal radios and larger and higher resolution screens, place a greater drain on battery life than ever before. As a result, engineers must consistently innovate to reduce the power consumption as new technolog... » read more

Plugging Holes In Machine Learning


The number of companies using machine learning is accelerating, but so far there are no tools to validate, verify and debug these systems. That presents a problem for the chipmakers and systems companies that increasingly rely on machine learning to optimize their technology because, at least for now, it creates the potential for errors that are extremely difficult to trace and fix. At the s... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers The finFET market is heating up. GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung and TSMC are ramping 16nm/14nm finFETs. And 10nm and 7nm finFETs are in the works. The market will shortly have a new competitor—Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC). Some years ago, UMC licensed finFET technology from IBM. UMC has been a bit quiet about the 14nm finFET technology, but it has made si... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers GlobalFoundries has rolled out its next-generation FD-SOI technology. The new 12nm FD-SOI process is called 12FDX. It is designed for a range of applications, from mobile computing and 5G connectivity to artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. "Some applications require the unsurpassed performance of finFET transistors, but the vast majority of connected devices need high l... » 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

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers AMD has entered into a long-term amendment to its wafer supply agreement (WSA) with GlobalFoundries for the period from Jan. 1, 2016 to Dec. 31, 2020. Today, GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 in Malta, N.Y. is playing a big role in providing leading-edge foundry capacity for AMD's graphics and processor products. As part of the amended deal, AMD will grant to West Coast Hitech, a subsidia... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Numbers IC Insights predicts TowerJazz and SMIC sales will jump this year, with the total pure-play foundry revenue forecast to grow 9%. That compares with 6% growth last year. TSMC is expected to shrink slightly to 58% market share, with GlobalFoundries staying flat at 11%. UMC will remain in third place in the rankings, followed by SMIC and TowerJazz. SEMI’s book-to-bill ratio jumped to... » read more

Can Analog And Digital Get Along Better?


How to bridge analog and digital is getting renewed attention as the amount of analog content that needs to be processed balloons with consumer and industrial IoT applications. Solving that problem isn’t going to be easy, though. To begin with, digital designers view designs in terms of voltages. Analog designers, in contrast, look at currents. “Unless you can analyze an [getkc id="37... » read more

Bridging The Gap Between RF Front-End Module Characterization And Production Test With The Semiconductor Test System


The rapid evolution of wireless connectivity has driven continual consumer thirst for more data throughput and reduced time to market. These pressures have led to modern signaling standards such as 802.11ac and LTE-Advanced, which have placed even more challenging design and test requirements on the most nonlinear and energy-demanding component in the transmitter, the RF power amplifier. The in... » read more

Preparing For 5G


If you like 4G LTE, you’re going to love 5G. The next-generation wireless communications technology will offer faster data transmission speeds and lower latency, providing the processing power to drive augmented-reality and virtual-reality applications for mobile devices and dedicated headsets. There is a caveat, though. The world needs to develop a consensus on what the 5G spectrum wil... » read more

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