Dealing With Two Very Different Sides Of 5G


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussi... » read more

Making Chips To Last Their Expected Lifetimes


Chips are supposed to last their lifetime, but that expectation varies greatly depending upon the end market, whether the device is used for safety- or mission-critical applications, and even whether it can be easily replaced or remotely fixed. It also depends on how those chips are used, whether they are an essential part of a complex system, and whether the cost of continual monitoring and... » read more

Scramble For The White Space


Chipmakers are pushing to utilize more of the unused portion of a design for different functions, reducing margin in the rest of the chip to more clearly define that white space. White space typically is used to relieve back-end routing congestion before all of the silicon area is used up. But a significant amount of space still remain unused. That provides an opportunity for inserting monit... » read more

The Quest To Make 5G Systems Reliable


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How do we measure the reli... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs AMD is in talks to acquire Xilinx in a deal that could be worth more than $30 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. If the deal transpires, AMD will enter the FPGA business, putting it further in competition with Intel. No deal has been struck, though. --------------------------------------------- Multiple sources believe that China’s Huawei i... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security A new certification program for hardware verification engineers from Edaptive Computing Inc (ECI) and OneSpin Solutions promises to help companies meet IC integrity standards for SoC designs for 5G, IoT, AI, automotive, industrial, defense, and avionics. These designs are often complex, with a variety of elements, such as programmable logic and different cores. The OneSpin Formal Veri... » read more

Israel: Startup Powerhouse


Israel is at the front of pack with China and the United States when it comes to tech startups. But when it comes to large, indigenous tech giants, the country is nowhere to be seen. Virtually every major semiconductor company does business in Israel, and many have a strong presence there through centers of excellence or companies they have acquired. But after decades of innovation ranging f... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Apple has launched a new Apple Watch and iPad. Missing from the announcement was the iPhone 12, which may appear next month, according to Krish Sankar, an analyst at Cowen. What was interesting about this week’s announcement? Apple unveiled the iPad Air with the A14 Bionic, Apple’s most advanced chip. “Apple revealed the new 8th gen iPad (starting at $329) powered by ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security Synopsys’ Software Integrity Group published the results of a security survey that looked at the ways organizations across industries are handling their software security initiatives and how to improve them. The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) version 11 (BSIMM11 Study) describes the work of 8,457 software security pros. FinTech — the technology that “follows the mon... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Top story NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) have announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund in a transaction valued at $40 billion. Market research Here’s the latest fab equipment forecast from VLSI Research: “The semiconductor equipment market has been very resilient in 2020 despite a very challenging macroeconomic ... » read more

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