Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan Renesas will acquire Transphorm, which designs and manufactures gallium nitride power devices, for about $339 million. GaN, which is a wide-bandgap technology, is used for high-voltage applications in a slew of markets, including EVs and EV fast chargers, as well as data centers and industrial applications. Cadence acquired Invecas, a provider o... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools Synopsys introduced a new model for using its EDA tools on the cloud. Synopsys Cloud provides pay-as-you-go access to the company's cloud-optimized design and verification products, with pre-optimized infrastructure on Microsoft Azure to address higher levels of interdependencies in chip development. "As more design flows incorporate AI, requiring even more resources, the virtually unlim... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Alphawave IP will acquire the OpenFive business unit from SiFive. The $210 million cash deal will bring OpenFive’s high-speed connectivity SoC IP portfolio to Alphawave and nearly double its IPs currently available, including an expanded die-to-die connectivity portfolio as well as adding data center and networking custom silicon solutions. "When we completed our IPO in 2021, we committed to ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Intel intends to take Mobileye public in mid-2022 on a US market through an IPO of newly issued stock. The subsidiary, which Intel acquired in 2017, develops SoCs for ADAS and autonomous driving solutions. Mobileye has achieved record revenue year-over-year with 2021 gains expected to be more than 40 percent higher than 2020, highlighting the powerful benefits to both companies of our ongoing p... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys will acquire the semiconductor and flat panel display solutions of BISTel. The acquisition will add an integrated and comprehensive yield management and prediction solution for manufacturing quality and efficiency. BISTel provides engineering equipment systems and AI applications for smart manufacturing in a range of industries. "Combining Synopsys' and BISTel's expertise in fab soluti... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm will acquire data center chip startup Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia's technology would be incorpora... » read more

RISC-V Challenges And Opportunities


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss open instruction set hardware and the future of RISC-V with Ben Levine, senior director of product management in Rambus' Security Division; Jerry Ardizzone, vice president of worldwide sales at Codasip; Megan Wachs, vice president of engineering at SiFive; and Rishiyur Nikhil, CTO of Bluespec. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (L-... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm acquired Treasure Data, a provider of enterprise data management solutions. Along with Mbed Cloud and the recent acquisition of Stream, which provides connectivity and device management, it will form the basis of Arm's new IoT management platform. Treasure Data was founded in 2011. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Bloomberg reported the price at $600 million. UltraSoC n... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Deals Verizon Communications agreed to acquire Sensity Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif., a supplier of energy-efficient light-emitting diode lighting equipment to serve as the foundation for its Internet of Things platform for smart cities; financial terms weren’t disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Mike Lanman, Verizon’s senior vice president of Enterprise P... » read more