Deals That Change The Chip Industry


Nvidia's pending $40 billion acquisition of Arm is expected to have a big impact on the chip world, but it will take years before the effects of this deal are fully understood. More such deals are expected over the next couple of years due to several factors — there is a fresh supply of startups with innovative technology, interest rates are low, and market caps and stock prices of buyers ... » read more

Moore’s Law Now Requires Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsung. W... » read more

Syntiant: Analog Deep Learning Chips


Startup Syntiant Corp. is an Irvine, Calif. semiconductor company led by former top Broadcom engineers with experience in both innovative design and in producing chips designed to be produced in the billions, according to company CEO Kurt Busch. The chip they’ll be building is an inference accelerator designed to run deep-learning processes 50x more efficiently than traditional stored-prog... » read more

Explosion Of Creativity


One of Steve Jobs' great revelations occurred while watching his young daughter use a computer with a graphical user interface. He observed that adults ask how to use a computer, whereas children ask what you can do with it. The semiconductor industry is experiencing one of those seminal moments with the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything. While work continues to ensure that electrons... » read more

Behind The Analog Frenzy


Analog is suddenly very hot again, and much of it appears to be due to the promise of 2.5D and 3D stacking. Texas Instruments pulled out its checkbook to pay $6.5 billion for National Semiconductor, and Microsemi has offered $28 million for AML Communications, which makes low-noise and high-power microwave amplifiers. So what’s behind these move? In TI’s case, there appears to be a re... » read more

Mobile Gaming: The Next Power-Saving Frontier


By Pallab Chatterjee Mobile and handheld gaming platforms are gaining lots of attention these days, and from a low-power engineering standpoint it poses a challenge that dwarfs any game played on the devices. Unlike mobile phones, these handheld platforms don’t have the luxury of trading off between multiple operating modes to extend battery life. Even worse, they have to perform at the ... » read more

Partitioning For Power


By Pallab Chatterjee Design partitioning for power in an IC is driven by which functions are on simultaneously. The new generation of “smart” power management chips introduces new constraints to the task. Case in point: The new LP8725 from National Semiconductor. These chips have multiple DC-DC converters and both analog and digital low-dropout regulators (LDOs), with a common I2C inter... » read more

Experts At The Table: Building A Better Mousetrap


Low-Power Design sat down with Richard Zarr, chief technologist for the PowerWise Brand at National Semiconductor; Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation business unit; Prasad Subramaniam, vice president of design technology at eSilicon; Steve Carlson, vice president of marketing at Cadence Design Systems, and David Allen, product director for power a... » read more

Experts At The Table: Building A Better Mousetrap


Low-Power Design sat down with Richard Zarr, chief technologist for the PowerWise Brand at National Semiconductor; Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation business unit; Prasad Subramaniam, vice president of design technology at eSilicon; Steve Carlson, vice president of marketing at Cadence Design Systems, and David Allen, product director for power at ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Building A Better Mousetrap


Low-Power Design sat down with Richard Zarr, chief technologist for the PowerWise Brand at National Semiconductor; Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation business unit; Prasad Subramaniam, vice president of design technology at eSilicon; Steve Carlson, vice president of marketing at Cadence Design Systems, and David Allen, product director for power at ... » read more

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