Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Deals Arm acquired Treasure Data, which offers a data management service. Financial terms weren’t revealed, although the transaction is reportedly worth $600 million. Joyce Kim, Arm’s chief marketing officer, told reporters that the purchase is “the largest cash deal we’ve done.” Along with the company’s introduction of Mbed Cloud (a device management service) last year and the acq... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys debuted new versions of its circuit simulation and custom design products. FineSim SPICE provides 2X faster simulation and Monte Carlo analysis speed, CustomSim FastSPICE offers 2X speed-up for post-layout SRAM simulation and maintains multi-core scalability by providing additional 2X speed-up on four cores, and HSPICE delivers 1.5X speed-up for large post-layout designs, accord... » read more

Hyperscaling The Data Center


Enterprise data centers increasingly will look and behave more like slimmed-down versions of hyperscale data centers as chipmakers and other suppliers adapt systems developed for their biggest customers to in-house IT faciilities. The new chips and infrastructure that will serve as building blocks in these facilities will be more power-efficient, make better use of space and generate less he... » read more

China’s Ambitious Automotive Plans


China has big plans for cars—and other related markets. After years of trailing behind Japanese, European and U.S.-based carmakers in automotive technology, reliability, status, and even market share within its own political borders, the country is making a concerted push into internally developed and manufactured assisted- and self-driving vehicles. The strategy plays out well for China o... » read more

The Evolving Data Center


Confession time. In addition to being utterly fascinated by all things chip design, I have always been absolutely enthralled by the magnificent data center. With a family member that has worked in them for most of his career, I can recalled being delighted to be amongst the racks in a second floor data center in Palo Alto in the early 90s. Time to time throughout my career it’s been thrilling... » read more

Custom Hardware Thriving


In the early days of the IoT, predictions about the commoditization of hardware and the end of customized hardware were everywhere. Several years later, those predictions are being proven wrong. Off-the-shelf components have not replaced customized hardware, and software has not dictated all designs. In fact, in many cases the exact opposite has happened. And where software does play an elev... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


At one time, China’s Xiaomi was a high-flying smartphone vendor. The privately-held company had a market capitalization of $45 billion. But the bottom has fallen out of the company amid share losses. “By early 2015, it was clear that problems were emerging as growth ground to a halt and nothing that Xiaomi has done since has been able to re-start it. Xiaomi has ground to halt because there ... » read more

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