The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab materials/tools The Reference Project, a pan-European research program created to develop radio-frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF-SOI) technology, was recently launched at the Bernin, France-based facilities of Soitec. Soitec is the project leader in the group, which has an eligible budget of 33 million euros. The project will focus on developing technologies for 4G+ communications usi... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Manufacturing United States President Barack Obama has announced the winner of the New Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute and manufacturing hub competition. The winner is the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC). This coalition, headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., brings together a consortium of nearly 200 partners from across academia, industry and non-profits. The idea is... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Through a joint venture with the government of Chongqing, GlobalFoundries will take over an existing 200mm fab in China. Then, GlobalFoundries plans to retrofit the facility and turn it into a 300mm fab. The foundry vendor is transferring its 180nm and 130nm processes to the China fab. Meanwhile, TSMC, UMC and others are also building fabs in China. Samsung Electronics has begu... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics uncorked the latest version of its Catapult high-level synthesis platform, adding a formal-based C Property Checker tool to automatically identify and formally prove hard-to-find issues like uninitialized memory, divide by 0, and array bounds errors in the users' HLS C++/SystemC model. IP ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors. According to ARM, the g... » read more

The Mightier Microcontroller


Microcontrollers are becoming more complex, more powerful, and significantly more useful, but those improvements come with strings attached. While it's relatively straightforward to develop multi-core microcontroller (MCU) hardware with advanced power management features, it's much more difficult to write software for these chips because memory is limited. CPUs can use on-chip memory such as... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Synopsys unveiled a new custom design solution targeting FinFET layout, introducing visually-assisted routing automation, a built-in design rule checking engine, templates to apply previous layout decisions to new designs, and IC Compiler integration. TSMC certified the new tool for 10nm and 7nm FinFET process technologies. It has also been adopted by STMicroelectronics, GSI Technology... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 29


Brain-inspired computing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. It will consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer. ... » read more

Timing Is Everything


It's easy to look back on companies or products that missed the market because they were too early. Remember the Eo? The brick-like personal digital assistant that AT&T introduced in 1993 had an antenna that hinted at 4G connectivity. Unfortunately, there was no 4G available at the time, so it was just an extra wire. (Check out the video of the tablet version here.) The EO 440 Personal... » read more

Simulating For Security


When we think of the field of cryptography, we often tend to think of math-intensive software encryption schemes, algorithms trying to prevent sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands, and hackers poring over code searching for potential loopholes in data sent over secure channels. However, we must also consider the fact that data has to physically make its way through transistors, p... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 9


3D chip consortium The 3D integration consortium of IRT Nanoelec has a new member--EV Group. Based in Grenoble, France, IRT Nanoelec is an R&D center headed by CEA-Leti. Formed in 2012, the 3D integration consortium is one of IRT’s core programs. EV Group joins Leti, Mentor Graphics, SET and STMicroelectronics as members of the 3D consortium. The program is developing a 3D integration ... » read more

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