News

Makimoto’s Wave, which tracks the swing of the chip industry between periods of  standardisation and customisation, looks good for at least the next decade, says Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons. This is the original version of Makimoto’s Wave –  first published in Electronics Weekly in 1991 Below  is the extended version of The Wave brought up to date by ...

UMC is looking at moving into developing a leading edge process capability which it hasn’t had for ten years. UMC CFO Liu Chitung told the Nikkei that the company is looking at moving into advanced process technologies but would need a partner to share the cost. A possibility is Intel with which UMC already has a partnership in mature technologies. ...

Wolfspeed, the SiC specialist, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company has entered arrangement with creditors that reduces by $4.6 billion its total debts estimated by Reuters at $6.5 billion. The company says it will reduce its interest bill on the debt by 60% . The company has cash of $1.3 billion. “Wolfspeed is continuing to operate as ...

IQE and Quinas Technology say they have successfully completed their £1.1m UltraRAM industrialisation project. This involved developing a scalable gallium antimonide (GaSb) epitaxy for memory devices. In July 2024 they were awarded the year’s funding by Innovate UK to take UltraRAM further towards mass production. Quinas Technology is the startup founded by IQE and the universities of Lancaster and Cardiff. ...

SiTime is aiming for 24 hour timing hold-over in data centres and 5G infrastructure with temporal synchronising software called TimeFabric. “TimeFabric, combined with SiTime’s oscillators and clocks, delivers up to 9x more accurate time synchronization than quartz-based solutions,” claimed the company. Dipping into this a little deeper, SiTime is claiming that a quartz-based OCXO with IEEE 1588 software will glitch ...

Keysight has combined it Electromagnetic Simulator with Synopsys’ AI-powered RF design migration flow for an integrated design flow to migrate from TSMC’s N6RF+ to N4P process technology. The migration workflow builds on the foundry’s Analog Design Migration (ADM) methodology to streamline the redesign of passive devices and design components to the advanced RF process rules. The collaborative migration workflow leverages ...

For physical AI at the edge, MIPS has introduced the Atlas Explorer portfolio. The company explained that it allows designers cycle-accurate repeatability of their workload onto a MIPS processor. It provides access to platform IP ahead of silicon availability for evaluation to enable pre-production RTL and for teams to develop optimised hardware and concepts such as digital twins to gain ...

“All the signs are showing that the market is picking up rapidly, and the theme from many suppliers at our recent sales conference centred on their concerns that if customers do not start placing backlog now, they will run into problems later this year as lead-times are forecast to quickly lengthen,” said distributor Anglia Components’ marketing director John Bowman (pictured). ...

DAC 2025: There was a lot of talk about AI at this year’s DAC but one of the most significant was that Siemens Digital Industries Software has added generative and agentic AI capabilities across its EDA portfolio. The EDA AI system applies across all semiconductor and PCB design suites, including Questra, Tessent, Xpedition, Veloce, Catapult, Calibre, Aprisa and Solido.  “It ...

The semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry is expected to have a CAGR of 7% 2024-28 to reach 11.1 million wpm in 2028, says SEMI. A key driver is the  expansion of advanced process capacity (7nm and below), which is expected to increase by approximately 69% – from 850,000 wpm in 2024 to 1.4 million wpm in 2028 – at a CAGR ...