Startup Funding: Q2 2024


AI drew more investors to the chip industry in Q2. Four AI-focused chip startups receiving rounds of more than $100 million, targeting data center ASICs for transformers, highly flexible platforms for the embedded edge, dataflow processors, and mixed-signal neuromorphic chips. In-memory computing also helped boost AI, with three companies either incorporating it into their chips or providing sp... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


SK hynix and TSMC plan to collaborate on HBM4 development and next-generation packaging technology, with plans to mass produce HBM4 chips in 2026. The agreement is an early indicator for just how competitive, and potentially lucrative, the HBM market is becoming. SK hynix said the collaboration will enable breakthroughs in memory performance with increased density of the memory controller at t... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Dec 5


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=171 /] More ReadingTechnical Paper Library home » read more

Alleviating the DRAM Capacity Bottleneck in Consumer Devices with NVMs


A new technical paper titled "Extending Memory Capacity in Modern Consumer Systems With Emerging Non-Volatile Memory: Experimental Analysis and Characterization Using the Intel Optane SSD" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Google, and Rivos. Abstract Excerpt "DRAM scalability is becoming a limiting factor to the available memory capacity in... » read more

Security Research: Technical Paper Round-Up


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at recent conferences, including the August 2022 USENIX Security Symposium and IEEE’s International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses (including on-chip mesh interconnect attacks), heterogeneous attacks on cache hierarchies, rowhammer attacks and mitig... » read more

An Escalation of Rowhammer To Rows Beyond Immediate Neighbors


Researchers at Graz University of Technology, Lamarr Security Research, Google, AWS, and Rivos presented this new technical paper titled "Half-Double: Hammering From the Next Row Over" at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022. Abstract: "Rowhammer is a vulnerability in modern DRAM where repeated accesses to one row (the aggressor) give off electrical disturbance whose cumu... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Acquisitions & Investments California-based MaxLinear plans to acquire Taiwan-based Silicon Motion (SMI), in a cash and stock deal valued at about $3.8 billion. Silicon Motion’s NAND flash controller technology for solid state storage devices, will extend MaxLinear’s RF, analog, and mixed signal portfolio. ISMC will invest about $3 billion in a semiconductor plant in India’s south... » read more