December ’18 Startup Funding: Big Rounds As 2018 Ends

By Jeff Dorsch - 03 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 0

During the month of December, 16 startups had private funding rounds of $100 million and up, with half of them in the mobility area. Those 16 rounds totaled $3.2 billion as the year concluded. Before the holidays, the SoftBank Vision Fund invested $500 million in Cambridge Mobile Telematics, provider of the DriveWell platform used by insurers, vehicle fleets, wireless carriers, and others to... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT

By Jeff Dorsch - 20 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Acquisitions ASSA ABLOY has agreed to acquire August Home, a startup providing home security products; the purchase price wasn’t revealed. August Home, which raised $75 million in private funding, should fit well with the Scandinavian conglomerate’s Yale lock business. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions; it is expected to close by the end of ... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 27

By Ann Mutschler - 27 Sep, 2016 - Comments: 0

Memory management scheme accommodates commercial chips In an improvement to a memory management scheme presented last year in which MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researchers unveiled what they said was a fundamentally new way of managing memory on computer chips — one that would use circuit space much more efficiently as chips continue to comprise more and more... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 23

By Ann Mutschler - 23 Feb, 2016 - Comments: 0

Making electrons act like liquid While electrical resistance is a simple concept in that rather like friction slowing down an object rolling on a surface, resistance slows the flow of electrons through a conductive material, and now, MIT professor of physics Leonid Levitov and Gregory Falkovich, a professor at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have found that electrons can sometimes tur... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: August 11

By Mark LaPedus - 11 Aug, 2015 - Comments: 0

World neutrino record The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has achieved a world record for high-energy neutrino experiments. In one neutrino experiment, researchers sustained a 521-kilowatt beam generated by the organization’s so-called Main Injector particle accelerator. The previous record was a 400-plus-kilowatt beam, which was accomplished at CERN. ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 10

By Jesse Allen - 10 Mar, 2015 - Comments: 0

Simulated memories Resistance-switching cells hold promise as a faster, higher capacity, lower power replacement for current non-volatile memory. Yet "the mechanisms that govern their remarkable properties have been poorly understood, limiting our ability to assess the ultimate performance and potential for commercialization," said Alejandro Strachan, professor of materials engineering at Pu... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 28

By Ann Mutschler - 28 Oct, 2014 - Comments: 0

Sensing objects without looking at them In a technique known as “interaction-free measurement,” Yale engineers have created a chip-scale device that senses the presence of an object without interacting with it by using the wave-particle duality of single photons. This work could help propel the field of quantum information processing. The researchers explained that the device uses silic... » read more

The Week In Review: Design

By Ed Sperling - 17 Jul, 2014 - Comments: 0

Tools Cadence unveiled two new tools. The first is a rapid prototyping platform that the company claims will shorten bring-up time by 70%, with 4X improvements in capacity, with IEEE 1801 support for low-power verification through its emulation platform. The second is a single and multi-corner custom/analog extraction tool, which it claims will improve performance by 5X. The tool has been cert... » read more

Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.