Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center, and back PC maker Dell Technologies is spinning off 81% equity ownership of VMWare to two standalone public companies. VMWare, founded in 1998, provides software to manage networking, apps, and cloud/data center. VMWare will pay a special dividend to its investing, which will generate $9.3 – $9.7 billion for Dell to use toward cutting it... » read more

Applications, Challenges For Using AI In Fabs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. Wh... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence debuted the Palladium Z2 Enterprise Emulation and Protium X2 Enterprise Prototyping systems. The Palladium Z2 is based on a new custom emulation processor, while the Protium X2 is based on Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P FPGAs. Designed to work together with a common front-end flow, they provide 2X capacity and 1.5X performance improvements over the previous generations, and ne... » read more

The Future Of Transistors And IC Architectures


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. What follows are excerpt... » read more

Blog Review: March 10


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out how the maturity of verification processes impact bug escapes in FPGA designs and whether safety critical development processes prevent bugs from escaping to silicon. Synopsys' Dennis Kengo Oka examines the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in automotive keyless entry systems and how security researchers hacked the Tesla Model X key fob. Cadence's Paul M... » read more

Auto OEMs Face New Competitive Threats


Automotive design and manufacturing are undergoing a fundamental shift to the left as cars increasingly are electrified and chips take over more functions formerly done by mechanical parts, setting the stage for massive disruption across a supply chain that has been in place for decades. The success of Tesla — a company that had never actually built a chip or a car — was both a surprise ... » read more

Chiplets For The Masses


Chiplets are a compelling technology, but so far they are available only to a select few players in the industry. That's changing, and the industry has taken little steps to get there, but timing for when you will be able to buy a chiplet to integrate into your system remains uncertain. While new fabrication nodes continue to be developed, scaling is coming to an end, be it for physical or e... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2021


In February, several startups emerge from stealth, with one company working on AI inference architectures for the data center and another trying to make lenses thinner by patterning surfaces with tiny structures. Two new Chinese companies are trying to expand the country's semiconductor design ecosystem with GPUs and interface IP. Plus, a maker of AI chips for ADAS draws another massive round t... » read more

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

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