Not to be outdone by General Motors with its investment in Lyft, its acquisition of Cruise and its launch of Maven, BMW is in the process of relaunching and expanding the DriveNow car share service in the U.S. and may soon provide aftermarket hardware to enable Mini lessees to rent their cars, according to a Bloomberg report.




Why is NXP Moving to FD-SOI?
The latest generations of power efficient and full-featured applications processors in NXP’s very successful and broadly deployed i.MX platform are being manufactured on 28nm FD-SOI. The new i.MX 7 series leverages the 32-bit ARM v7-A core, targeting the general embedded, e-reader, medical, wearable and IoT markets, where… Read More
IoT Devices Making Inroads into Semicon Revenue
Last year IC Insights forecasted IOT semiconductor growth rate to be around 19% CAGR for next five years. And within that space, the O-S-D (Optoelectronics, Sensors, and Discrete) semiconductors were expected to grow at a CAGR of 26%, one among the fastest. In 2015, the O-S-D revenue was at $66.6 billion, i.e. ~19% of total semiconductor… Read More
Apple should buy Tesla and appoint Elon Musk as CEO!
Apple’s dismal earnings announcement shows why it badly needs to rethink its innovation model and leadership. Its last breakthrough innovation was the iPhone — which was released in 2007. Since then, Apple has simply been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and playing with … Read More
3D NAND – Moore’s Law in the third dimension
For more than a decade 2D NAND has been the leading driver of lithography shrinks, for example, Samsung went from 120nm in 2003 to 16nm in 2014 with shrinks on an almost yearly basis, but the shrinks came at a price. At 16nm Self Aligned Quadruple Pattering (SAQP) was required for the most critical layers and patterning related costs… Read More
One FPGA synthesis flow for different IP types
Both Altera and Xilinx are innovative companies with robust ecosystems, right? It would be a terrible shame if you located the perfect FPGA IP block for a design, but couldn’t use it because it was in the “wrong” format for your preferred FPGA. What if there were a way around that?
There is a compelling argument to use each FPGA vendor’s… Read More
Neural nets for Qualcomm Snapdragon
Neural nets are hot these days. In this forum certainly you can’t swing a cat without hitting multiple articles on the topic – I’ve written some myself. For me there are two reasons for this interest. First, neural nets are amazingly successful at what they do, for example in image recognition where they can beat… Read More
Seven Reasons to Attend DAC in Austin
I’m attending the 53rd Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas starting June 5th, and there are at least seven reasons that you should consider attending as well. For decades now DAC has been the premier place for all the players in our semiconductor ecosystem to get together: Academics, Commercial vendors … Read More
Is the Future Finally Here? What a GaAs!
Back in 1983 I was working for Texas Instruments during the beginning of the push to let common electrical engineers develop their own CMOS application specific ICs (ASICs). This would eventually the be the fuel that fed the semiconductor engine to reach over $335 billion in 2015. At that time, I was a young guy and I had a rascally … Read More
Qualcomm’s New Smartphone Chips Go Straight At MediaTek
Last Thursday at Qualcomm’s Financial Analyst Day the company made a slew of chip announcements ranging from the industry’s 1 Gbps wireless LTE modem to a custom designed smartwatch SoC and platform called “Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC”. In between those, Qualcomm also announced a few very overlooked … Read More
What is Vibe Coding and Should You Care?