Chip Industry Week In Review


DAC: Chips to Systems Conference  The energy and buzz at this year's Design Automation Conference surprised everyone — despite initial concerns about its location in Long Beach, California, which is well off the beaten path for semiconductors. Hot topics included AI automation, multiphysics simulation, compute-in-memory, chiplets, physical  AI, and the development and orchestration of AI a... » read more

Blog Review: July 29


Synopsys' Greg Sorber finds that the next era of compute will be defined less by raw speed and more by architectural intelligence, the abstraction of hardware complexity, and the co-design of silicon, software, and systems. Cadence's Shyam Sharma looks at what's in the latest DDR PHY Interface 6.0 specification, including re-centering on newer memories, updated command bus signal naming, and... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Notable deals  Amkor and Nvidia signed a $1.5B multiyear agreement to develop advanced packaging and test technologies for next-gen AI and accelerated-computing platforms. Nvidia’s prepayment will support Amkor’s U.S. capacity expansion in Arizona, including high-density interconnect and heterogeneous integration capabilities. Siemens announced plans to acquire two EDA companies: D... » read more

Untangling Chip Traffic Jams


Key Takeaways: Defining all possible cases of coherent and non-coherent traffic is non-trivial, and designers need to use a mix of hardware-assisted verification and simulation tools to do so. For NoCs connecting multiple dies, simulation is challenging due to the very large number of interconnects and multiphysics issues involving thermal and crosstalk. Advanced verification approac... » read more

How Wireless Coexistence Testing Exposes Real‑World Medical Device Behavior


Modern medical devices rely on wireless connectivity to support alarms, clinician workflows, and continuous patient monitoring. Some wireless performance issues appear intermittently and only under specific interference conditions. These behaviors can be hard to reproduce late in development or after deployment. Coexistence testing provides a structured way to reveal and understand these failur... » read more

Bringing Design Data Management into the Developer Workflow


As digital design workflows increasingly center on modern, text-based development environments, engineers expect the same efficiency from design data management as they do from coding tools. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has become a preferred platform for developing RTL, HDL, scripts, and verification assets, offering a flexible and extensible workspace that streamlines day-to-day engineering t... » read more

Blog Review: July 22


Synopsys' Dana Neustadter and Ilya Tolchinsky warn that physical AI creates a different kind of security challenge that requires continuous runtime assurance to ensure outputs remain within safe operating bounds as conditions change. Cadence's Hamid Shojaei argues that building a reliable agent for chip design relies on closing the loop, where the agent proposes something, a tool gives it ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Advanced manufacturing, packaging Intel Foundry will invest €5B to expand Intel 3 capacity at its Leixlip, Ireland campus. The company also entered high-volume manufacturing for a subset of Panther Lake processors manufactured on its 18A using ASML’s High-NA EUV technology. UMC delivered the first production wafers for SILITH’s 1.6T silicon photonics platform from its 300mm Singa... » read more

Blog Review: July 15


Cadence's Anupriya K explains how Address Translation Services (ATS) acts as the fast lane for PCIe memory access by caching address translations directly on the device and what makes it one of the toughest verification problems to solve. Synopsys' Greg Sorber considers the economic potential of physical AI and the impact that embedding intelligence into robots, vehicles, and equipment will ... » read more

Startup Funding: Q2 2026


Investors kept pouring money into AI hardware startups in the second quarter of 2026. While companies focused on chips for AI data centers have largely dominated the funding over the past year, startups creating edge silicon re-emerged this quarter as investors see the appeal of physical AI and real-time on-device applications. However, large-scale AI infrastructure chips and other attendant as... » read more

← Older posts