How Does A Changing Automotive Ecosystem Affect Tier-1 Suppliers?


Tier-1 automotive suppliers have an enormous opportunity in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Fortune.com sees these vehicles contributing $7 trillion in economic activity by the year 2050. But this opportunity comes with a challenge: the whole supply chain is being disrupted by new participants and new technologies that are making these AVs possible. Semiconductor companies and spe... » read more

Who’s Watching The Supply Chain?


Every company developing chips at the most advanced process nodes these days is using different architectures and heterogeneous processing and memory elements. There simply is no other way to get the kind of power/performance improvements needed to justify the expense of moving to a new process node. So while they will reap the benefits of traditional scaling, that alone is no longer enough. ... » read more

Security Tradeoffs In A Shifting Global Supply Chain


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss a wide range of hardware security issues and possible solutions with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit at ANSYS; Helena Handschuh, fellow at Rambus, and Mike Borza, principal security technologist at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. The first part of this discussion ca... » read more

Where Should Auto Sensor Data Be Processed?


Fully autonomous vehicles are coming, but not as quickly as the initial hype would suggest because there is a long list of technological issues that still need to be resolved. One of the basic problems that still needs to be solved is how to process the tremendous amount of data coming from the variety of sensors in the vehicle, including cameras, radar, LiDAR and sonar. That data is the dig... » read more

Changes In Smart Manufacturing


Tom Salmon, vice president of collaborative technology platforms at SEMI, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changing in smart manufacturing, the impact of more data and AI, what the ROI looks like for these kinds of investments, and how that affects overall equipment efficiency. While the biggest bang will come from advanced nodes, it also is targeted at advanced packaging. » read more

The Danger Of Twin Supply Chains


No matter how the ongoing dispute between the United States and China turns out, damage already has been done. It's not the kind of damage that is immediately visible to the outside world. It's more of the long-term, policy-shift kind of problem, which over time will likely prove much worse. Many executives have termed recent sanctions on Huawei and other Chinese companies "China's Sputnik m... » read more

SEMI Calls For U.S.-China Tariff Removals


In testimony today before a U.S. government interagency panel considering tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, SEMI called for the removal of about 30 tariff lines, which cover items central to the semiconductor manufacturing process. Mike Russo, vice president of global industry advocacy at SEMI, explained in his testimony that while SEMI strongly supports efforts to better... » read more

CEO Outlook: It Gets Much Harder From Here


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's changing across the semiconductor industry with Wally Rhines, CEO emeritus at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Jack Harding, president and CEO of eSilicon; John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions; and John Chong, vice president of product and business development for Kionix. What follows are excerpts of that discussion, which was held in... » read more

March’19 Startup Funding: Money Springs Forth


Another month, another couple of billion-dollar rounds. Singapore-based Grab raised nearly $1.5 billion from the SoftBank Vision Fund, bringing its total private funding to more than $4.5 billion and valuing the company at around $14 billion. Grab has acquired Uber’s ride-hailing business in Southeast Asia and now competes chiefly with Go-Jek of Indonesia in Thailand and other emerging mar... » read more

Chiplets – Taking SoC Design Where No Monolithic IC Has Gone Before


The chiplet movement is a reaction to the rapidly changing IC landscape and the current IC fabrication realities. Engineers are increasingly realizing that it makes little sense to integrate every IP block in a system on one piece of silicon if the fit is poor. There are many advantages with monolithic silicon integration, but those advantages are rapidly being outweighed by the economics of bu... » read more

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