Firmware Skills Shortage


Good hardware without good software is a waste of silicon, but with so many new processors and accelerator architectures being created, and so many new skills required, companies are finding it hard to hire enough engineers with low-level software expertise to satisfy the demand. Writing compilers, mappers and optimization software does not have the same level of pizazz as developing new AI ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility With the chip supply so tight it is shutting down automotive production lines, U.S. chip company CEOs signed a Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) letter asking the U.S. president to include funding incentives for the chip manufacturing in U.S. economic recovery plans. The letter references the CHIPS for America Act and asks the president to work with Congress to suppo... » read more

Servers Are Becoming More Heterogeneous


The number of CPUs in a server is growing, and so is the number of vendors that make those processors. CPU server build has been one, two, four, and occasionally more x86 processors, with IBM’s Power and Z series as the major exception. While x86 processors aren't necessarily being replaced, they are being complimented and augmented with new processor designs for a variety of more speciali... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 3


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on the outlook from SEMI's recent Industry Strategy Symposium, which looked at the prospects for global recovery, the application areas where growth is expected, and how segments have recently performed. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at trends in the adoption of languages and libraries for IC and ASIC designs and finds continued interest in System... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Packaging and test Intel has invested an additional $475 million in its chip assembly and test manufacturing facility in the Saigon Hi-Tech Park (SHTP) in Vietnam. This takes Intel’s total investment in the Vietnam facility to $1.5 billion. The site assembles and tests Intel’s 5G products and processors. TSMC recently announced a huge increase in capital spending for 2021. A large perce... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm will acquire data center chip startup Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia's technology would be incorpora... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Apple wants to have self-driving cars in production by 2024, and that timeframe includes having its own battery technology, according to Reuters. Project Titan, the name of Apple’s automotive efforts, has seen its ups and downs, but now Apple has a clearer view of what its strength and niche will be — consumer self-driving cars with a longer range, less expensive batter... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Austin, Texas-based automotive startup Uhnder raised $45 million in Series C funding for its digital radar-on-chip. Telechips, a fabless semiconductor company that works on automotive SoCs, is using Arm’s IP to design its Dolphin5 SoC for ADAS (advanced drive assistance systems) and digital cockpits with in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). Dolphin5 will include the Arm’s Mali-G78A... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 16


Arm's Benoit Labbe investigates why battery monitoring is so important for a low-power microcontroller and shows how it was implemented in the M0N0 MCU while drawing a fraction of a nW in typical conditions. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at how much of their time FPGA design engineers spend on verification, and the tasks that keep verification engineers the busiest. Synopsys' Sc... » read more

Edge Inference Applications And Market Segmentation


Until recently, most AI was in data centers/cloud and most of that was training. Things are changing quickly. Projections are AI sales will grow rapidly to tens of billions of dollars by the mid 2020s, with most of the growth in edge AI inference. Data center/cloud vs. edge inference: What’s the difference? The data center/cloud is where inference started on Xeons. To gain efficiency, much ... » read more

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