Startup Funding: December 2020


AI hardware startups were hot in our December startup-funding focus, with two companies landing rounds exceeding $100M and plenty of others seeing investment. Two Chinese EDA companies received funding in a bid to boost the country's semiconductor ecosystem. One company providing control systems for fabs achieved $8M in Series A, and both autonomous driving and electric vehicles pulled in lots ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research After years of falling demand, the PC market is back. The second quarter of 2020 ended well for the traditional PC market, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations. Global PC shipments jumped 11.2% year-over-year reaching a total of 72.3 million units, according to IDC. As restrictions around the world tightened in the first few weeks of the quarter, demand for notebo... » read more

Inference Moves To The Network


Machine-learning inference started out as a data-center activity, but tremendous effort is being put into inference at the edge. At this point, the “edge” is not a well-defined concept, and future inference capabilities will reside not only at the extremes of the data center and a data-gathering device, but at multiple points in between. “Inference isn't a function that has to resid... » read more

Falling Chip Forecasts


It’s time to take a pulse of the semiconductor market amid the memory downturn and trade frictions with China. For some time, the DRAM and NAND markets have been hit hard with falling prices and oversupply. Then, the Trump administration last year slapped tariffs on Chinese goods. China retaliated. And the trade war rages on between the U.S. and China. More recently, the U.S. Department... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things IBM this week launched the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, which combines artificial intelligence, Internet of Things technology, and cloud-based offerings, providing insights to farmers through a managed service. Among other features, growers can deploy drones to send photos to the IBM Cloud for AI-based trend analysis and detection of crop diseases. The platform ... » 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

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Intel has announced the resignation of Brian Krzanich as chief executive and a member of the board. The board has named Chief Financial Officer Robert Swan as interim chief executive, effective immediately. Intel was recently informed that Krzanich had a “past consensual relationship” with an Intel employee. This is a violation of Intel’s non-fraternization policy, which ap... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Conferences Keynote highlights from the Internet of Things World 2018 conference: “Safety is the most important thing,” said Russ Benson, vice president of IT product systems at Boeing; “It’s all about data,” said Juan Perez, chief information officer and chief engineering officer of UPS; “Semiconductors accelerate IoT growth,” said Tony Keirouz, vice president of IoT strategy, e... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers UMC has appointed two senior vice presidents--S.C. Chien and Jason Wang--as co-presidents of the company, following Po-Wen Yen’s retirement as UMC’s CEO. The co-presidents are accountable for the overall performance of UMC. They will report to UMC Chairman Stan Hung. Chien will focus on the core manufacturing and technology aspects of UMC, including R&D and operations. Wang wil... » read more

Chaos, Progress In Mobile Payment Security


Semiconductor suppliers and their embedded software partners, internally and externally, have made tremendous strides in recent years supporting secure mobile payment processing. It hasn't been easy. Or simple. And it's still evolving. The result of those efforts, which is now set to play an increasingly important and widespread commercial role in 2017, are trusted execution environment t... » read more

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