What’s the Right Path For Scaling?


The growing challenges of traditional chip scaling at advanced nodes are prompting the industry to take a harder look at different options for future devices. Scaling is still on the list, with the industry laying plans for 5nm and beyond. But less conventional approaches are becoming more viable and gaining traction, as well, including advanced packaging and in-memory computing. Some option... » read more

Quantifying the Value of On-Chip Debug


White paper authored by Semico Research, quantifies the benefits of using on-chip debug and monitoring technology, specifically UltraSoc's technology. Rising design complexityIn the last several years, contemporary SoCs (system-on-a-chip) have become increasingly complex. They now consist of 100s of millions of gates, 100 or more discrete semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) blocks, hi... » read more

Foundries See Growth, New Issues In 2019


The silicon foundry business is poised for growth in 2019, although the industry faces several challenges across a number of market segments next year. Generally, foundry vendors saw steady growth in 2018, but many are ending the year on a sour note. Weak demand for Apple’s new iPhone XR and a downturn in the cryptocurrency market have impacted several IC suppliers and foundries, causing t... » read more

Packaging Biz Faces Challenges in 2019


The IC packaging industry is bracing for slower growth, if not uncertainty, in 2019, even though advanced packaging remains a bright spot in the market. Generally, IC packaging houses saw strong demand in the first part of 2018, but the market cooled in the second half of the year due to a slowdown in memory. Going forward, the slower IC packaging market is expected to extend into the first ... » read more

Trade Disputes Increase Market Uncertainty


The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization held its bi-annual forecast meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona last month, and one of the topics that seemed to be on everyone’s mind is the impact of tariffs and the trade tensions between the United States and China. The need to impose tariffs on U.S. imports of semiconductors is perplexing and frequently confusing. President Trum... » read more

AI Chip Architectures Race To The Edge


As machine-learning apps start showing up in endpoint devices and along the network edge of the IoT, the accelerators that make AI possible may look more like FPGA and SoC modules than current data-center-bound chips from Intel or Nvidia. Artificial intelligence and machine learning need powerful chips for computing answers (inference) from large data sets (training). Most AI chips—both tr... » read more

A Crisis In DoD’s Trusted Foundry Program?


The U.S. Department of Defense’s Trusted Foundry program is in flux due to GlobalFoundries’ recent decision to put 7nm on hold, raising national security concerns across the U.S. defense community. U.S. DoD and military/aerospace chip customers currently have access to U.S.-based “secure” foundry capacity down to 14nm, but that's where it ends. No other foundries provide similar “s... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm announced a new processor targeted at autonomous driving applications. The Cortex-A76AE is a superscalar, out-of-order processor that incorporates Split-Lock safety technology. Split-Lock allows CPU clusters in an a SoC to be configured either in ‘split mode’ for high performance, allowing two (or four) independent CPUs in the cluster to be used for diverse tasks and applications, or �... » read more

Market Trends For Large Volume Semi Products


Material and capacity shortages typically prompt changes in normal operating procedures, especially purchasing strategies. If the uncertainty regarding world trade policies and tariffs are added on top of the shortages, the impact results in unusual gyrations in industry sales data and possible misleading signals. Discretes, analog and opto are the three largest semiconductor product categories... » read more

Cracking The Auto IC Market


The market for automotive electronics is booming, and it has set off a global scramble among established chipmakers and startups. What's becoming clear, though, is that not everyone understands just how different automotive is from the mobile market. Mobile is still the highest-volume market for semiconductors, but the growth has flattened. In contrast, the value of the automotive electronic... » read more

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