Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. Renesas plans to acquire Altium, maker of PCB design software, for $5.9 billion. In a conference call, Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata cited Altium's PCB design software and digital twin virtual modeling as key components of its future strategy. "I believe it will generate transformational value for our combined customers and our stakeholders," Shib... » read more

Academic Research Paper Round-Up: April 13


The volume of research into advanced semiconductors is rising and widening. The latest batch includes hybrid power-gating architecture, RRAM devices models, improved FMEA, quantum machine learning, enhanced nonlinear optics, harvesting energy after sundown, direct chemisorption-assisted nanotransfer printing, and more. Topping the list of researchers this week are ETH Zurich, Stanford Unive... » read more

Graphene oxide 2D films integrated with nanowires and ring resonators for enhanced nonlinear optics


New research paper from Optical Sciences Centre, Swinburne University of Technology. Abstract "We report enhanced nonlinear optics in nanowires, waveguides, and ring resonators by introducing layered two-dimensional (2D) graphene oxide (GO) films through experimental demonstration. The GO films are integrated on silicon-on-insulator nanowires (SOI), high index doped silica glass, and sili... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 30


Universal decoding algorithm Researchers at MIT, Boston University, and Maynooth University built a silicon chip that is able to decode any error-correcting code, regardless of its structure, with maximum accuracy, using a universal decoding algorithm called Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND). Encoded data traveling over a network is susceptible to noise, which disrupts the sig... » read more