The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Toronto-based Ecobee, which markets smart thermostats, raised $61 million in its Series C funding, bringing the total funding for the 11-year-old company to $146 million. Energy Impact Partners led the new round and was joined by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Relay Ventures, and Thomvest. Ecobee counts Nest Labs, the Google subsidiary, as its chief rival. ThoughtWire, also headquartered in... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Microchip inked an agreement to acquire Microsemi, provider of chips for defense and aerospace, for $68.78 per share in cash. The acquisition price represents a total equity value of about $8.35 billion and a total enterprise value of about $10.15 billion, according to Microchip. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018. Silvaco acquired NanGate. Founded in 2004, ... » read more

32GT/s PCI Express Design Considerations


Today’s networking and rapidly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications are requiring more bandwidth in accelerators and GPUs, as well as faster interconnects to transmit and receive greater amounts of data. Towards the middle of 2017 the PCI-SIG industry consortium announced its latest specification, PCIe 5.0, which raised the data rate from 16GT/s to 32GT/s and doubled the link... » read more

Why All Nodes Won’t Work


A flood of new nodes, half-nodes and every number in between is creating confusion among chipmakers. While most say it's good to have choices, it's not clear which or how many of those choices are actually good. At issue is which [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] will be available for those nodes, how that IP will differ from other nodes in terms of power, performance, area and sensitivity to a v... » read more

New Issues In Advanced Packaging


Advanced packaging is gaining in popularity as the cost and complexity of integrating everything onto a planar SoC becomes more difficult and costly at each new node, but ensuring that these packaged die function properly and yield sufficiently isn't so simple. There are a number of factors that are tilting more of the the semiconductor industry toward advanced [getkc id="27" kc_name="packag... » read more

Meeting ISO 26262 Software Standards


Software controls everything from safety critical systems like brakes and power steering, to basic vehicle controls like doors and windows. Yet the average car today may have up to 150,000 bugs, many of which could damage the brand, hurt customer satisfaction and, in the most extreme case, lead to a catastrophic failure. Software development testing is designed to help developers, management an... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 7


Synopsys' Amit Paunikar and Shaily Khare take a look at new features in LPDDR5, from improved data bandwidth and Deep Sleep Mode to WCK clock. Cadence's Paul McLellan dives into forward error correction, a technique for automatically correcting errors in transmitted network data, with a look at why it's important and how it works. In his latest embedded software video, Mentor's Colin Wall... » read more

Toward High-End Fan-Outs


Foundries and OSATs are working on more advanced fan-outs, including some with vertically stacked die inside the package, filling a middle ground between lower-cost fan-outs and systems in package on one side and 2.5D and 3D-ICs on the other. These new [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-outs"] have denser interconnects than previous iterations, and in some cases they include multiple routing layer... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Startup OnScale launched with advanced CAE multi-physics solvers that are seamlessly integrated with a scalable, high performance cloud computing platform built on Amazon's AWS. The company's model is built around a Solver-as-a-Service pay-as-you-go subscription model and targets 5G, IoT/Industrial IoT, biomedical, and autonomous car markets. The company has $3 million in strategic seed fund... » read more

How To Secure The Network Edge


Microcontrollers, sensors, and other devices that live at the edge of the Internet must be protected against cyberattacks and intrusions just as much as the chips in data centers, network routers, and PCs. But securing those edge devices presents a swath of unique challenges, including the cost and availability of technology resources, as well as varying levels of motivation to solve these prob... » read more

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