Getting Paid More


Consolidation is a regular news item in the semiconductor industry, and has been for years, but most of those deals have been relatively small. What's changing is the amount of consolidation involving big companies, fueled partly by a massive M&A fund in China, partly by an arms race in preparation for the IoE, and partly by the kind of thinking that if other companies are doing it, it's dan... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 26


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg attended IDF and learned more about the newly announced Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory technology named Optane including initial ship dates and some implementation details. In concluding his analysis of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster reveals an unexpected finding about design size and respins. How do you keep your power grid from bein... » read more

Nymi: Wearable Authentication


If you had one device that could log into all your electronics automatically, allowing you to make electronic payments more securely based on your heart beat rhythms, would you use it? That's the question a startup named Nymi is asking—and a lot of other companies are watching. The company began its life in 2011 using a biometric electrocardiogram developed at the University of Toronto. ... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 19


Several of this week's top reads from Ansys' Justin Nescott sound like they're straight from the pages of sci-fi novels (and comic books). An MIT project is getting close to creating the Iron Man suit, one company plans to finally build a space elevator, and Los Angeles takes an innovative approach to fighting the California drought: 96 million black plastic balls. Smartphones are so yestery... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In Chip Business


Shifting business models, acquisitions, minority investments and increasing uncertainty are creating fundamental shifts in the semiconductor industry that could redefine who is successful in which markets for years to come. The announcement today that [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"] is developing memory controller chips, expanding its business beyond just creating IP for the memory an... » read more

How Much Security Is Enough?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the current state of [getkc id="223" kc_name="security"] and what must be done in the future, with Denis Noël, head of cyber security solutions at [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"]; Serge Leef, vice president of new ventures at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Andreas Kuehlman, senior vice president and general manager of the soft... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


IC Insights released its top-20 chip rankings in terms of sales for the first half of 2015. Samsung’s growth rate in 2Q ‘15 put the company closer to catching Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker. IC Insights also showed how the top-20 rankings would have looked if the proposed Avago/Broadcom and NXP/Freescale mergers were in place. Avago/Broadcom would have been ranked 7th and NXP/Freesc... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence unveiled Joules, its new RTL power analysis solution. The tool performs design synthesis using a new integrated prototype mode of Cadence's Genus Synthesis product, including physically aware clock tree and datapath buffering, and enabling accurate RTL power estimation. IP Synopsys and ASMedia completed a successful interoperability demonstration of Synopsys' USB 3.1 Devi... » read more

Cryptography For ULP Devices


Soon virtually everything and everyone will be connected to the IoE in one fashion or another, and much of it will be wireless. To make it all work, these wireless, and low-power devices will need a new paradigm for handling cryptography. Ultra-low power devices have an interesting, and challenging set of metrics. There are, in general, two approaches that can work, with a variety of sub-sce... » read more

The Promise Of NFC For Industry 4.0


There have been several points, in the history of manufacturing, when technology has truly revolutionized the way products are made. In the early part of the 20th century, the steam engine and electrification led to mass production, and in the 1970s, when robotics, computers, and other types of automation came on the scene, productivity got another big boost. Since then, though, technology has ... » read more

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