Victrex plc today announces the creation of a joint-venture between its subsidiary, Victrex Hong Kong Limited, and Yingkou Xingfu Chemical Company Limited, to build and operate a new PEEK polymer manufacturing facility in Liaoning, China, subject to certain performance conditions, including finalizing land purchase and permit applications. Victrex, which will be the majority partner and lead the joint-venture, will benefit by further differentiating and complementing its portfolio of PEEK and PAEK grades, in anticipation of a range of significant long-term growth opportunities across several end markets in China, as well as aligning with China’s ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative, where specifying domestically produced PEEK in certain applications is expected to gain momentum.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS) today announced that it expanded its collaboration with Broadcom Inc. for the creation of semiconductor solutions targeting next-generation networking, broadband, enterprise storage, wireless and industrial applications. Building upon successful 7nm designs, Cadence and Broadcom are expanding the collaboration to include the creation of 5nm designs using Cadence® digital implementation solutions. With these Cadence solutions in place, Broadcom can further augment engineering productivity and improve silicon performance and power.

The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) opened yesterday with the theme Data Driven Innovation and Growth. The annual three-day conference of C-level executives gives the year’s first comprehensive outlook of the global electronics manufacturing industry. For the nearly 300 attendees at ISS 2020, opening day highlighted market and technology opportunities and a reflection on the significant pricing and international trade challenges the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain faced in 2019.

Many of the most challenging optimization problems encountered in various disciplines of science and engineering, from biology and drug discovery [1] to routing and scheduling [2] can be reduced to NP-complete problems. Intuitively speaking, NP-complete problems are “hard to solve” because the number of operations that must be performed in order to find the solution grows exponentially with the problem size. The ubiquity of NP-complete problems has led to the development of dedicated hardware (such as optical annealing and quantum annealing machines like “D-Wave”) and special algorithms (heuristic algorithms like simulated annealing).

Picosun Group, global provider of leading AGILE ALD® (Atomic Layer Deposition) thin film coating solutions, reports record performance of silicon-integrated, three-dimensional deep trench microcapacitors manufactured using its ALD technology. Increasing efficiency and performance demands of portable and wearable electronics, along with their shrinking size in accordance with the Moore’s law, set new challenges to the power management of these devices as well. A solution is further integration of the devices’ key components into so-called SiP (systems-in-package) or SoC (systems-on-chip) architectures, where everything, including the energy storage such as batteries or capacitors, is packed close to each other into one compact, microscale-miniaturized assembly.