Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Silicon Labs worked with Norway’s Q-Free to create the ParQSense Smart Parking Sensor, which helps drivers find available outdoor parking spaces. ParQSense uses the chip company’s Wonder Gecko wireless microcontroller for connectivity and control. Having gone through pilot testing in the European Union and North America this year, ParQSense is being released for commerci... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade wars After opposing $34 billion in U.S. trade tariffs on behalf of the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry, Jonathan Davis, global vice president of industry advocacy at SEMI, recently spoke out against an additional $16 billion in duties on Chinese goods. The tariffs do little to address U.S. concerns over IP loss, according to SEMI. Over the past month, SEMI has also submitte... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC has reduced its outlook for 2018 revenue and capital spending, according to Bloomberg. The company blamed the outlook on sluggish “mobile and digital currency mining demand,” according to the report. Samsung has developed the industry’s first 10nm-class 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM. The 8Gb LPDDR5 boasts a data rate of up to 6,400 megabits-per-second (Mb/s), which is 1.5 tim... » read more

Embedded Flash Scaling Limits


Embedded nonvolatile flash memory has played a key role in chips for years, but the technology is beginning to face some scaling and cost roadblocks and it’s not clear what comes next. Embedded flash is used in several markets, such as automotive, consumer and industrial. But the automotive sector appears to be the most concerned about the future of the technology. Typically, a car incorpo... » read more

How To Test Autonomous Vehicles


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling The race is on to develop ways of testing autonomous vehicles to prove they are safe under most road conditions, but this has turned out to be much more difficult than initially thought. The autonomous vehicle technology itself is still in various stages of development, with carmakers struggling to fine-tune AI algorithms that can guide robots on wheels th... » read more

Regulations Trail Autonomous Vehicles


Fragmented regulations and unrealistic expectations may be the biggest hurdles for chipmakers selling into the market for self-driving cars during the next few years. Carmakers and the semiconductor industry have made tremendous progress building real-time vision systems and artificial intelligence into relatively traditional automobiles during the past decade or so. But federal and state re... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Trade President Trump this week announced his decisions on the actions the administration will take in response to China’s alleged unfair trade practices covered in the USTR Section 301 investigation of “China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation.” Trump has proposed import tariffs that amount to about $60 billion on pro... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers and OEMs Last month, Arizona approved Google’s Waymo unit to begin testing a commercial self-driving vehicle program. And recently, Waymo released a video showing its first autonomous ride-hailing service. “This development inches us closer than ever to a ‘first-man-on-the-moon’ landmark for Level 5 autonomous transport,” said Derek Viita, an analyst from Strategy Analytic... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools and test Applied Materials reported record revenue and operating profit in its first quarter ended Jan. 28. Compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2017, Applied grew net sales by 28% to $4.20 billion. In the second quarter of fiscal 2018, Applied expects net sales to be in the range of $4.35 billion to $4.55 billion. “AMAT posted F1Q results above guidance as NAND demand, in p... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Christopher Rolland, an analyst at Susquehanna International, expects to see more merger and acquisition activity in the IC industry heading into 2018. “M&A activity slowed in 2017, but the year is going out with a bang!” Rolland said in a recent research note. Towards the end of 2017, for example, Broadcom made a bid for Qualcomm, while Marvell announced intent to buy Cavium. ... » read more

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