Chip Industry Week In Review


Siemens announced plans to acquire Altair Engineering, a provider of industrial simulation and analysis, data science, and high-performance computing (HPC) software, for about $10 billion. Altair's software will become part of Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio and provide a boost to physics-based digital twins. Onto Innovation bought Lumina Instruments, a San Jose, California-based maker of lase... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


JEDEC and the Open Compute Project rolled out a new set of guidelines for standardizing chiplet characterization details, such as thermal properties, physical and mechanical requirements, and behavior specs. Those details have been a sticking point for commercial chiplets, because without them it's not possible to choose the best chiplet for a particular application or workload. The guidelines ... » read more

Research Bits: May 28


Nanofluidic memristive neural networks Engineers from EPFL developed a functional nanofluidic memristive device that relies on ions, rather than electrons and holes, to compute and store data. “Memristors have already been used to build electronic neural networks, but our goal is to build a nanofluidic neural network that takes advantage of changes in ion concentrations, similar to living... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans for retooling existing automotive factories for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and supporting local jobs, plus a notice of intent for $3.5 billion in funding to expand domestic manufacturing of batteries for EVs and the nation’s grid, and for battery materials and components that are currently imported... » read more

Research Bits: March 21


Micropatterning with sugar A scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered a transfer printing process that can deposit microcircuit patterns on curved and textured surfaces using sugar candy. Transfer printing methods, such as flexible tapes, are often used for surfaces that are difficult to directly print on. But they have difficulty with conforming to ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


With funding from the Semiconductor Research Corporation, a group of 10 universities is banding together to create the Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory center, or PRISM, led by University of California San Diego. The $50.5 million PRISM center will focus on four different themes: novel memory and storage devices and circuits; next generation architectures; systems and software; an... » read more

Research Bits: Sept. 20


Multi-mode memristors Researchers from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Empa built a new memristor that can operate in multiple modes and could potentially be used to mimic neurons in more applications. “There are different operation modes for memristors, and it is advantageous to be able to use all these modes depending on an artificial neural network’s architecture,” said R... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 14


Thermal management material Engineers at the University of California Los Angeles integrated a new thermal management material, boron arsenide, with a HEMT chip to demonstrate the material's potential. The team developed boron arsenide as a thermal management material in 2018 and found it to be very effective at drawing and dissipating heat. In the latest experiments, they used wide band... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 27


Room-temp superconductivity Researchers at the University of Rochester, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Intel created a material with superconducting properties at room temperature, the first time this has been observed. The researchers combined hydrogen with carbon and sulfur to photochemically synthesize simple organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in a diamond anvil cell, which... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 2


Neuromorphic memristor Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst used protein nanowires to create neuromorphic memristors capable of running at extremely low voltage. A challenge to neuromorphic computing is mimicking the low voltage at which the brain operates: it sends signals between neurons at around 80 millivolts. Jun Yao, an electrical and computer engineering researcher at ... » read more

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