MEMS Microphones: A Bright Spot Among Commoditized Consumer Sensors


MEMS microphones have emerged as a bright spot among consumer sensors, which in general are going through a rapid commoditization and profit-squeezing trend. To understand what’s driving the MEMS microphone market, consider that the Apple iPhone 7 and 7S each have 4 MEMS microphones. As reported by System Plus Consulting, the latest iPhones have “a front-facing top microphone, presumably f... » read more

Big Data On Wheels


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling All kinds of chips are going into driver-assisted and autonomous cars. On one side are arrays of sensors, which are generating huge amounts of data about everything from lane position and proximity to other cars to unexpected objects in the road. On the other side are the chips required to process that data at blazing speed. As the market for PCs and mobil... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Market Research There will be 8.4 billion connected things in use this year, a 31% gain from 2016, and leading up to 20.4 billion connected devices in 2020, according to Gartner. The market research firm estimates worldwide spending on endpoints and services will hit nearly $2 trillion in 2017. Greater China, North America, and Western Europe account for two-thirds of the IoT installed base th... » read more

What Can Go Wrong In Automotive


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss automotive engineering with Jinesh Jain, supervisor for advanced architectures in Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto; Raed Shatara, market development for automotive infotainment at [getentity id="22331" comment="STMicroelectronics"]; Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; ... » read more

What Can Go Wrong In Automotive


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss automotive engineering with Jinesh Jain, supervisor for advanced architectures in Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto; Raed Shatara, market development for automotive infotainment at [getentity id="22331" comment="STMicroelectronics"]; Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; ... » read more

Making Secure Chips For IoT Devices


Chips and modules going into Internet of Things node devices must have cybersecurity features designed and built into them. Multiple vendors are responding with products meant to keep the IoT devices protected from the cyberattacks that are becoming more common. While [getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"] privacy remains a key concern for consumers and homeowners, IoT security has taken on top-of-mi... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


M&A TDK has agreed to acquire InvenSense for $13 a share, representing a total of $1.3 billion in cash. The transaction must be approved by InvenSense shareholders and regulatory agencies; TDK expects to wrap up the deal in the second quarter of its fiscal year ending in March of 2018 (the third quarter of the calendar year). Apple accounted for 40% of InvenSense’s revenue for the fiscal... » read more

Foundries See Mixed Future


Amid a tumultuous business environment, the silicon foundry industry is projected to see steady growth in a number of process segments in 2017. As in past years, the foundry market is expected to grow faster than the overall IC industry in 2017. But at the same time, the IC industry—the foundry customer base—continues to witness a frenetic wave of merger and acquisition activity. Basical... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Nov. 23


Materials database The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has published a study that quantifies the thermodynamic scale of metastability of some 29,902 materials. To quantify the materials, researchers used Berkeley Lab’s Materials Project, a large and open database of known and predicted materials. The open and Web-based database has calculated the properties ... » read more

Securing The IoT


Last week’s massive distributed denial-of-service attack, directed at Dyn DNS—a small New Hampshire-based company that operates part of the Internet’s Domain Name System—brought many popular websites to a crawl. Among those affected were such giants as Airbnb, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon and Netflix. The Internet outages spread from the East Coast of the United States to the rest of the ... » read more

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