EE Times Current

The AI Hardware Summit in Silicon Valley. This year’s edition did not go as planned. Also, the semiconductor industry is, of course global. India has an ambition to build a thriving semiconductor industry, building on the companies based there that have been designing chips for many, many years. Does the country have the infrastructure to make good on its ambitions? And, we have a report from the...

All of the elements of the 5G consumer business are coming together. Network operators are building out infrastructure to expand 5G cellular coverage in more markets. What’s needed next is a wider variety of 5G smartphones. Huawei, Qualcomm, and Samsung – three of the most important manufacturers of integrated circuits for smartphones – all happened to announce new 5G silicon last week. We talk ab...

Xilinx just released one honking huge field-programmable gate array. We’ll discuss why anyone would need an FPGA more than one-and-a-half times bigger than the previous biggest. The political protests in Hong Kong have repercussions for the nearby technology hub of Shenzhen – and for the electronics industry at large. Netflix just debuted a documentary called “American Factory” that examines what...

Homomorphic encryption. It’s… well, it’s really complicated. Just stick around and we’ll explain it all. Chinese memory chip supplier GigaDevices just make a huge splash in China introducing a line of RISC-V microcontrollers – the company claims they’re the first general purpose RISC-V MCUs ever. We’ll discuss why this MCUs are significant. Ultra WideBand is back, this time with some brand new cap...

AMS decided to purchase Osram. The former specializes in sensors, the latter in photonics; together they’ll chart an intriguing technological roadmap. We’ll find out what the combination will mean for the market. The Hot Chips conference was held this week. We’ve got a rundown of one of the hottest, an unconventional wafer-scale AI processor from secretive startup Cerebras. Also today: smart water...

This is your Briefing for the week ending August 16th. Photonics – it’s not just for fiber optics anymore. In this episode, we’ve got a discussion about photonics, quantum sensors, and the potential for an all-optical computer. Broadcom bought Symantec last week. We ask editor Rick Merritt, Why on Earth a chip company would want to get into the market for business software? Over the years, the EDA...

Are you one of the hundreds of millions of people who can't wait to get a 5G cell phone? Your wait is almost over. Almost. Do you remember ultra-wideband? It was proposed a few years ago. Didn't catch on. But now it's back. The new ultra-wideband is based on a different technology, has new capabilities and is aimed at completely different applications. You'd think they'd come up with a new name, y...

This is your Briefing for the week ending August 2nd. We want the Internet of things to be smart, but being smart requires processing power – which will be lacking in millions of IoT devices. It’s what we call in the business “a conundrum.” But – there may be an answer! You’ll hear what that is. As we reported last week, the biggest companies in the world are beginning to compete with their own ch...

This week we’re mixing it up a bit. In this episode, we’re going to focus on a single topic. It’s how the world’s biggest companies are doing business in ways no company has before – and what that might mean for everybody – not just the technology industry.

This week… Artificial intelligence is a vastly complex market. There’s a fierce competition among hardware vendors to be the best platform for AI applications. But first, you have to know what it means to be “the best.” This week, analyst Karl Freund from Moor Insights talks to us about the latest AI benchmarks. Researchers are re-imagining what – fundamentally – a vehicle is. One company just put...

Our stories this week: You might recall pilot Chesley Sullenberger. He became a hero a few years back for crash landing a disabled passenger airliner into New York's Hudson River with no loss of life. He recently appeared in front of Congress to testify about the crashes of the Boeing 737. We discuss his testimony and what it means for Boeing and for other engineering companies. We've got an on-si...

This week… Facial recognition is being deployed more frequently, but is the technology ready? And, are we ready for it? President Trump said he is lifting official restrictions on doing business with Huawei, an important supplier to communications companies around the world. What does that mean for the global electronics industry moving forward? And we talk with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Alex Li...

This week… The French research institute LETI held a conference on artificial intelligence at the edge. What does putting AI on the edge of the network mean, and what’s the advantage? EE Times editors were in Grenoble, and filed a report. A few weeks ago, PCI introduced a new ultra-fast networking specification that will make data centers perform even better, and that will make the internet faster...

Our lineup this week includes: A guided tour through London’s Tech Week, an annual extravaganza of new technologies. Unsurprisingly, this year there was an emphasis on artificial intelligence. We’ll have a report on the race to build the fastest supercomputers. And, you know those GPS apps you use for driving? Self-driving vehicles use maps too, but they need maps that are far more accurate. First...

This week: RISC-V has profound implications for the smartphone market; we checked to see if it’s ready. Moore’s Law will end –  unless maybe chiplets? Engineers are getting drawn into the gig economy, and it’s not the ones you’d think. And after 40 years, TI’s Speak & Spell speaks again.

In this week's briefing we discuss Infineon's bombshell announcement: the $10 billion dollar acquisition that seemed to come out of nowhere – Infineon bought Cypress Semiconductor, and the Design Automation Conference – DAC. If you know what’s happening with design tools, that gives you a good handle on what’s happening with the semiconductor industry.

This week we’ve got a dispatch from Monte Carlo about the recent Grand Prix ELECTRIC vehicle race. Also, a separate report on what’s going on with chips for Autonomous Vehicles. And we’ve been talking about the trade war with China from the US point of view – this week, our correspondent in China discusses how China’s high-tech industry thinks about the conflict.

Today is Friday, May 24th, and this is your EE Times Weekly Briefing. The biggest story in electronics this week affects almost everyone in the high-tech industry – from Huawei to Google to Infineon – to chip companies, circuit board suppliers – essentially the entire supply chain. The Trump Administration this week took steps that will certainly isolate Huawei and possibly cripple it. What was on...

This is your EE Times Weekly Briefing. Today is Friday, May 17th, and among the top stories this week: A sobering roadmap of semiconductor process technology-- potentially coming to a halt at 2 nanometers We were at the Electronic Distribution Show in Vegas last week. On the last day, the news broke that the United States had escalated a trade war with China. How will that affect the supply chain?...

This is your EE Times Weekly Briefing. Today is Friday, May 10th, and among the top stories this week: Google I/O, Google's developers’ conference. CEO Sundar Pichai touted Google’s awakening to privacy for its users’ data. This week, EE Times launched a new Special Project package on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on AI fairness. We ask and answer the question: “Will Machines Ev...

This is your EETimes Weekly Briefing. Today is Friday, May 3rd, and among our top stories this week: A one-on-one interview with Hassane El-Khoury, CEO of Cypress Semiconductors. We’ll review the intelligence we picked up at the recent 5G Brooklyn Summit on the question: “If 5G is enough, do we need 6G?" And we’ll explain why Taiwanese companies who moved manufacturing in China decades ago are now...

This is your EE Times Weekly Briefing. Today is Friday, April 26th, and among the top stories this week: ON Semi buys Globalfoundries’ ex IBM fab; TSMC’s CMOS process node shrinks, and Tesla’s Kitchen Sink Approach to autonomous vehicles. Later in the show, Echo Zhao will be here to discuss the 2019 China fabless survey results. And, at the bottom of the show, Bolaji Ojo, will join us to discuss w...

This is your EETimes Weekly Briefing. Today is Friday, April 19th, and among the top stories this week: Samsung is moving toward a 5-nanometer foundry process; Underwriters Lab is collaborating with Edge Case Research to draft a standard for autonomous systems. And we take a peek into Finland’s "Radio Valley" to learn about “Life after Nokia.”

Today is Friday, April 12th, and among the top stories this week - Qualcomm’s new data-center AI inference accelerator chip, the latest deep learning developments unveiled at a Stanford University gathering, and a new development that throws a monkey wrench into the debate about V2X – vehicle to everything -- in Europe.

Among the top stories this week: Intel’s new memory architecture; an exclusive interview with Greg Travis – a veteran software engineer and instrument-rated pilot. We ask him if Boeing 737 Max MCAS software can be fixed. We also look at STMicroelectronics’ strategic priority on silicon carbide; and how the risk-averse business mentality is making Japan’s car OEMs slow to embrace the global auto ma...