The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Samsung has formed a new foundry division and rolled out a range of new processes. Specifically, Samsung plans to develop 8nm, 7nm, 6nm, 5nm and 4nm. It also introduced an 18nm FD-SOI technology. GlobalFoundries has provided more details about its 300mm fab plans in China. The company and the Chengdu municipality have announced an investment to develop an ecosystem for its 22nm ... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Conferences It’s been an action-packed week at Internet of Things World. The show was co-located at the Santa Clara Convention Center with the Connected & Autonomous Vehicles conference. There were lots of deals announced and many products or services debuted at IoT World, which has grown enormously in four years, from 700 attendees at its first event in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2014 to some 14... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


SoftBank plans to sell a 25% stake in ARM to Vision Fund, a $100 billion technology fund created last year by SoftBank and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. SoftBank and Saudi Arabia are investing $25 billion and $45 billion in the fund, respectively. Another potential major player is Mubadala Development Co., the government-owned Abu Dhabi investment firm which owns GlobalFoundries and, a... » read more

Looking Back On IoT In 2016


The Internet of Things was going great guns for most of 2016. Until October 21, that is. That’s the date of the coordinated cyberattacks on Dyn, an Internet performance management services firm. The distributed denial-of-service attacks quickly had impacts on Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Twitter, and other popular websites. Dyn was able to fight off the aggressive att... » read more

Ready For Social Robots?


After years of steady growth, innovation and sometimes disappointment, the robotics market is heating up on several fronts amid some new breakthroughs in the arena. Both the industrial and service robotics markets are hot. In addition, the consumer market is seeing a new level of interest, as the industry is invaded by the next wave of so-called personal assistant robots or social robots for... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Security The Internet of Things was in the news this week, and not for good reasons. Unsecured IoT devices were implicated in the substantial distributed denial-of-service attack that severely affected popular websites on October 21. Well ahead of this event, ARM Holdings was planning to make IoT security its leading theme at this week’s ARM TechCon 2016 conference and exposition in Santa Cl... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools and T&M Applied Materials and the Institute of Microelectronics (IME), a research institute under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), have announced a five-year extension of their R&D collaboration at the Centre of Excellence in Advanced Packaging in Singapore. The organizations will expand the scope of their R&D collaboration to focus on advancing fan-out wafer... » read more

The Zen Of Processor Design


Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at Advanced Micro Devices, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss how to keep improving performance per watt, new packaging options, and the increasing focus on customization for specific tasks. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As we get more into the IoT and we have to deal with more data, not to mention cars where da... » read more

Behind The ARM-SoftBank Deal


Weeks after SoftBank announced plans to buy ARM for $32 billion, the deal continues to reverberate across the global semiconductor industry. Any acquisition of this magnitude leaves customers, suppliers and partners a little skittish. And for good reason—ARM is the No. 1 supplier of commercial processor IP. Much of the fabless semiconductor market, as well as some IDMs, cross paths with AR... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Deals The big news of the week, of course, is SoftBank Group’s proposed acquisition of ARM Holdings for a breathtaking $32.2 billion in cash. In announcing the deal, the companies made it abundantly clear that the proposed acquisition is chiefly about Internet of Things technology. “When I think about the investment and the commitment that’s going to be required to develop the future te... » read more

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