Startup Funding: December 2021


Chinese startups dominated last month's fundraising, with companies from the country comprising about two-thirds of those covered in this report. In addition to the number of companies, startups from China also drew significant amounts of funding, with a display driver company and an EV battery maker each garnering around $1B and six more companies seeing rounds over $100M. Two particularly ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Security Addressing the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities has not gone smoothly. Intel's firmware update caused unexpected behavior and a higher than expected number of reboots for its Haswell and Broadwell chips, leading the company to recommend users stop patching until an updated version of the patch is available. Microsoft's attempts to fix the issue left some W... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Real Intent updated its Ascent Lint product, adding 50 new customer-driven rules, improved support of VHDL and System Verilog, and a new database-driven debugger with an integrated source browser and improved schematic visualization. IP ARM launched a new real-time processor with advanced safety features for autonomous vehicles and medical and industrial robots. The processor, Co... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A The FTC has given the go-ahead to ON Semiconductor's acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor. As part of the requirements, ON Semiconductor had to divest its planar insulated gate bipolar transistor business, which will be sold to Littelfuse. (Littelfuse will also pick up the transient voltage suppression diode and switching thyristor product lines for a combined $104 million in cash.... » read more