Electronics Supply Chain News & Analysis

Twist On Negative Charge Enables IoT Transmitters

Researchers from MIT created a transmitter that significantly reduces off-state leakage but is powerful enough to broadcast to devices dozens of yards away.

Xilinx Tips 16nm FinFET FPGAs

FPGA vendor puts multiple Cortex-A and Cortex-R processor cores on next-generation UltraScale+ FPGAs being implemented in TSMC's 16FF+ manufacturing process.

UMC Expands Partnership With SST

Already possessing a license for 55nm embedded Superflash and now bringing that technology to volume, UMC has also taken a license for 40nm embedded flash products from SST.

Applied Rolls E-beam Metrology Tool for 3D, FinFETS

Scanning electron microscope specially designed for measuring the high aspect ratio and complex features of 3D NAND and FinFET devices.

Altera FPGAs Accelerate Microsoft Neural Network Engine

Convolutional Neural Network algorithms hosted on servers with FPGA support do an energy efficient job of running image recognition and natural language processing tasks, says Altera.

IMEC Boosts Directed Self-assembly Lithography Process

The use of self-organizing polymers to create nanometer-scale structures that can be patterned is getting closer to commercial deployment. IMEC is getting defect levels down and is setting up an international conference on the topic.

Fab Tool Book-to-Bill Improves

Ratio moves back above parity after slipping in December.

Semiconductor Material Enables Spintronics Devices

Researchers developed a new compound acceptable to build spintronic properties into a material that's stable at room temperature and tailored to a variety of applications.

Load Switch IC Provides One Basic Function

Micrel's MIC95410 high-side load switch allows a single digital control line to turn a subcircuit's supply voltage rail on/off, for rails ranging from under one volt up to 5.5 V, and currents up to 7 A.

Japan's Gigaphoton Boosts Brightness of EUV Source

Gigaphoton claims it has an EUV optical source that can offer continuous operation of 140W at a 50 percent duty cycle.

NXP Forms Chinese Power Semiconductor Joint Venture

NXP is taking a minority share in a Chinese joint venture for the supply of power semiconductors with the Chinese state as its partner.

Spansion Enters Automotive ADAS Power IC Market

Spansion has been a player in the ADAS market for flash and MCU products but this is the first power management IC for the automotive sector.

China Pumps Cash Into SMIC

Chinese foundry SMIC is $400 million better off thanks to the purchase by the government of newly-printed shares in the company.

LED Claims 33% Efficiency Boost

Cree said the LED will allow for a reduction of cost and size of lighting platforms as well as enabling a higher performance for track, downlight and outdoor lighting.

Qualcomm Adds 4K, improved LTE to Mid-Tier Snapdragons

Qualcomm has used the recently-announced Cortex-A72 core from ARM to upgrade its mid-tier Snapdragon 600 series of mobile processors.

Altera Teams with Mentor for Virtual Platforms

EDA vendor to help deliver software system that works with all of Altera’s line of system on chip field programmable gate arrays.

FPGA Vendor Reaches FinFET Volume Production

It's taken time but Achronix is in volume production with two members of it Speedster22i FPGA family built on Intel's 22nm FinFET manufacturing process technology.

Globalfoundries Partners with imec on IoT

Foundry, research center are working together for future generations of radio architectures, mobile handset efficiency upgrades and the Internet of Things.

Samsung Begins Mass Production of 14nm Mobile Processor

Mass production of a 14nm FinFET application processor is rolling at Samsung putting the company's leading edge for logic on the same node as Intel and ahead of foundry market leader TSMC.