Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

Cheaper Fan-Outs Ahead


Packaging houses continue to ramp up fan-out wafer-level packages in the market, but customers want lower cost fan-out products for a broader range of applications, such as consumer, RF and smartphones. So in R&D, the industry for some time has been developing next-generation fan-out using a panel-level format, a technology that could potentially lower the cost of fan-out. But there are ... » read more

Advanced Packaging Moves To Cars


By Ann Steffora Mutschler and Ed Sperling As automotive OEMs come up to speed on electrification of vehicles, each at their own pace, they are starting to embrace novel packaging approaches as a way to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market. Wirebond used to dominate this market, where most of the chips were relatively unsophisticated and product cycles were slow�... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers UMC has generated sales from its recently-announced 14nm finFET technology. The foundry vendor also plans to enter the 22nm process technology market. UMC will join other players in the 22nm arena, such as GlobalFoundries, Intel and TSMC. “So we do have a plan to introduce our 22nm as well and it will be available around 2018,” said Jason Wang, the newly appointed co-president o... » read more

Foundries Accelerate Auto Efforts


Foundries are ramping up their efforts in automotive chip production in preparation for a surge in semiconductors used in assisted and autonomous driving. All of the major foundry vendors are scrambling to assemble the pieces and expand their process portfolios for automotive customers. The foundries are seeing a growing demand from automotive IC customers amid the push toward advanced drive... » read more

Blog Review: July 19


Synopsys' Prishkrit Abrol provides a detailed explanation of how the USB Type-C connector works. Mentor's Ricardo Anguiano examines how the RISC-V ecosystem is expanding and latest developments in the open source toolchain. Cadence's Gopi Krishnamurthy explains the lane margining requirements of the PCIe 4.0 specification. ARM's Chet Babla unravels some claims about Narrowband IoT, Cat... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Toshiba and its fab partner, Western Digital, have jointly rolled out a 96-layer 3D NAND product amid a legal dispute. The companies have developed prototype samples of a 96-layer 3D NAND device. Samples of the new 96-layer product, which is a 256 gigabit (32 gigabytes) device, is scheduled for release in the second half of 2017 and mass production is targeted for 2018. Separately, ... » read more

Open-Source NFV


The OPNFV Summit in Beijing earlier this month brought together developers, end users, and other communities all working to advance open source Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). What's new is an effort to make NFV more efficient. A highlight of the event was the announcement of an exciting new platform for accelerating NFV software development, the “NFV PicoPod”. Developed in coll... » read more

Blog Review: June 28


Mentor's Craig Armenti notes the benefits, and challenges, of investing in modular design in the PCB domain. Cadence's Paul McLellan covers a DAC chat with CEO Lip-Bu Tan on the rise of advanced packaging and investments in AI and autonomous driving. Synopsys' Jim Hartnett examines some of the challenges and tradeoffs involved in building good security practices in hospital environments. ... » read more

Tuesday At DAC


Accellera got everyone out of bed early this morning to talk about the just announced early access release of Portable Stimulus. The panel was made up with people from user companies. Semiconductor Engineering will be providing full coverage of this event, but perhaps the important message is that the panelists were eager to get adoption within their companies but knew that there would be chall... » read more

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