Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools ASML said it has disagreed with any implication that it has been a victim of “Chinese espionage,” as stated in an article in a Dutch newspaper. The article discusses the results of a public court case in the United States that ASML won last year. In the case, XTAL was found by a jury to have misappropriated ASML’s confidential and proprietary information as well as trade secret... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Diamond semiconductor IP vendor AKHAN Semiconductor is cooperating with a U.S. federal investigation into alleged theft of its intellectual property by China’s Huawei. When AKHAN agreed to send its proprietary technology to Huawei pursuant to an agreement, AKHAN “believes that Huawei destroyed our product, shipped it to China without authorization, subjected it to tests... » read more

What Will Intel Do Next?


The writing is on the wall for big processor makers. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are developing their own processors. In addition, there are more than 30 startups developing various types of AI accelerators, as well as a field of embedded FPGA vendors, a couple of discrete FPGA makers, and a slew of soft processor cores. This certainly hasn't been lost on Intel. As the world's largest... » read more

The Race To Zero Defects


By Jeff Dorsch and Ed Sperling Testing chips is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and much more critical—particularly as these chips end up in cars, industrial automation, and a variety of edge devices. Now the question is how to provide enough test coverage to ensure that chips will work as expected without slowing down the manufacturing process or driving up costs. Balanci... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Arm uncorked its first forward-looking CPU roadmap and performance numbers for client computing. The company said it expects to deliver annual performance improvements of more than 15% per year through 2020. The targeted market includes 5G, always-on, always-connected devices. C3 IoT will work with Google Cloud to support artificial intelligence and Internet of Things dep... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC has reduced its outlook for 2018 revenue and capital spending, according to Bloomberg. The company blamed the outlook on sluggish “mobile and digital currency mining demand,” according to the report. Samsung has developed the industry’s first 10nm-class 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM. The 8Gb LPDDR5 boasts a data rate of up to 6,400 megabits-per-second (Mb/s), which is 1.5 tim... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Consumers recently filed a class-action suit against the three DRAM makers, alleging that they illegally agreed to raise prices for their respective memory products. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Samsung, Micron and Hynix agreed to limit the supply of DRAM, driving up prices for this widely used memory. The pri... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Trade The trade tensions are building between the U.S. and China. In the latest move, the U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed a ban on U.S. companies selling chips to ZTE, a Chinese telecom equipment and mobile phone vendor. The ban has been implemented on ZTE for seven years after the firm “was caught illegally shipping U.S. goods to Iran,” according to a report from Reuters. This ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Market research The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) opened with the theme “Smart, Intuitive & Connected: Semiconductor Devices Transforming the World.” Click here for some of the highlights at ISS. Here are more highlights from ISS. Korea is on a spending spree for fab tools. In total, Samsung and SK Hynix are forecast to invest over $20 billion in fab tools worldwide in 2018... » read more

A New Memory Contender?


Momentum is building for a new class of ferroelectric memories that could alter the next-generation memory landscape. Generally, ferroelectrics are associated with a memory type called ferroelectric RAMs (FRAMs). Rolled out by several vendors in the late 1990s, FRAMs are low-power, nonvolatile devices, but they are also limited to niche applications and unable to scale beyond 130nm. While... » read more

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