Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Apple purchased a portfolio of eight granted and pending patents that belonged to Lighthouse AI, a smart home security camera startup that ceased operations near the end of 2018. The portfolio was acquired at about the same time, according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; financial terms weren’t revealed. Also not disclosed, as usual, is what Apple will do with t... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Nvidia will acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion in cash, the largest deal in the chipmaker's history. Traditionally a PC GPU company, Nvidia has made a push into high-performance computing, particularly for AI workloads. Founded in 1999, Israel-based Mellanox focuses on end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. According to Nvidia, Me... » read more

Nvidia to Buy Mellanox for $6.9B


Nvidia reached a definitive agreement to acquire Mellanox Technologies for $125 a share in cash, giving the deal an enterprise value of about $6.9 billion. The proposed transaction would complement Nvidia’s product portfolio in high-performance computing for applications in artificial intelligence and big data analytics, with Mellanox’s specialty in providing interconnects for hyperscale da... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Cattle ranchers in Australia are using solar-powered ear tags to keep track of their herds, connecting through LoRa technology to locate their bulls, cows, heifers, and steers. SODAQ of the Netherlands and Lacuna Space of the U.K. are providing the Internet of Things technology and satellite-based LoRa connectivity to make this possible. “The main differentiator for LoRa o... » read more

In-Memory Vs. Near-Memory Computing


New memory-centric chip technologies are emerging that promise to solve the bandwidth bottleneck issues in today’s systems. The idea behind these technologies is to bring the memory closer to the processing tasks to speed up the system. This concept isn’t new and the previous versions of the technology fell short. Moreover, it’s unclear if the new approaches will live up to their billi... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Engineering simulation company ANSYS says thanks to new features in its ANSYS Twin Builder, product developers may be able save money in warranty and operational costs. The Twin Builder creates a digital twin of a systems in the field, enabling a convenient way to monitor and maintain systems remotely. The latest release adds predictive maintenance features for digital-twin runt... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Taiwan specialty foundry vendor Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) will acquire GlobalFoundries’ Fab 3E facility in Singapore for $236 million. Fab 3E manages a monthly capacity of approximately 35,000 200mm wafers. The transaction includes buildings, facilities, and equipment, as well as IP associated with GF’s MEMS business. VIS currently has three 200mm fa... » read more

Clock Domain Crossings in the FPGA World


Clock domain crossing (CDC) issues cause significant amount of failures in ASIC and FPGA devices. As FPGA complexity and performance grows, the influence of CDC issues on design functionality grows even more. This paper outlines CDC issues and their solutions for FPGA designs. Various design techniques are presented together with real-life examples for Xilinx and Intel FPGA devices. More import... » read more

Taming Concurrency


Concurrency adds complexity for which the industry lacks appropriate tools, and the problem has grown to the point where errors can creep into designs with no easy or consistent way to detect them. In the past, when chips were essentially a single pipeline, this wasn't a problem. In fact, the early pioneers of EDA created a suitable language to describe and contain the necessary concurrency ... » read more

More 2.5D/3D, Fan-Out Packages Ahead


A new wave of 2.5D/3D, fan-out and other advanced IC packages is expected to flood the market over the next year. The new packages are targeted to address many of the same and challenging applications in the market, such as multi-die integration, memory bandwidth issues and even chip scaling. But the new, advanced IC packages face some technical challenges. And cost remains an issue as advan... » read more

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