AKHAN Semiconductor Inc., in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, announced a successful demonstration of a new diamond-based coating technology that will enhance survivability of manned and unmanned military aircraft systems at the AUSA Annual Meeting and Expo. AKHAN Semiconductor Inc. is a technology company specializing in the fabrication and application of electronics-grade diamonds as functional semiconductors. The Illinois-based company has been awarded numerous patents and trademarks for inventions under its Miraj Diamond® Protective Coating platform of products.
GLOBALFOUNDRIES Acquires Smartcom’s PDK Engineering Team to Expand Worldwide Design Enablement Capacity
GLOBALFOUNDRIES® (GF®), the world’s leading specialty foundry, announced today that it has acquired the PDK (Process Design Kit) engineering team from Smartcom Bulgaria AD in Sofia, Bulgaria. The newly acquired team will enhance GF’s scale and capabilities, while strengthening competitiveness of its specialized application solutions to further position the company for growth and value creation.
SIA Statement on ‘Phase One’ U.S.-China Trade Agreement
“The ‘phase one’ agreement announced today is welcome news for the semiconductor industry, and we look forward to seeing it finalized. Today’s deal eases tensions and gives both sides a chance to get back to the negotiating table to strike a more comprehensive deal in the future. We’re especially encouraged new tariff increases will not go forward on Oct. 15. We urge negotiators to build on this momentum and reach a high-standard, enforceable, and sustainable agreement that ensures a level playing field for companies doing business in China, protects IP, and removes harmful tariffs.”
Ultrafast Particle Interactions Could Help Make Quantum Information Devices Feasible
A study conducted by researchers at the University of Campinas’s Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics (IFGW-UNICAMP) in São Paulo State, Brazil, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Michigan’s Physics Department in Ann Arbor, USA, and Sungkyunkwan University’s Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology (SAINT SKKU) in Seoul, South Korea, set out to understand the decoherence process on the femtosecond (10-15 s) timescale. An article describing the results was published in Physical Review Letters.
Scientists Discover Method to Create and Trap Trions at Room Temperature
Trions consist of three charged particles bound together by very weak bonding energy. Although trions can potentially carry more information than electrons in applications such as electronics and quantum computing, trions are typically unstable at room temperature, and the bonds between trion particles are so weak that they quickly fall apart. Most research on trions requires supercooled temperatures, and even then, their fleeting nature has made trions difficult to control and hard to study. A University of Maryland-led team of researchers has discovered a method to reliably synthesize and trap trions that remain stable at room temperature.
Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF) and Plasma-Therm Collaborate on Atomic Layer Etching (ALE)
The Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF), a leading university research facility at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and Plasma-Therm LLC, an innovator in plasma processing technology, located in St. Petersburg, FL, announce a joint development agreement (JDA) to advance atomic layer etching (ALE) for nanoscale device fabrication. Under this agreement, Plasma-Therm will provide a state-of-the-art ALE system, while CNF will provide ALE process and device development on a wide range of materials serving a broad research community.
NVIDIA Leads the Fast-Growing and Complex Edge AI Chipset Market but Competition is Intensifying
Diversity is the name of the game when it comes to the edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) chipset industry. In 2019, the AI industry is witnessing the continual migration of AI workloads, particularly AI inference, to edge devices, including on-premise servers, gateways, and end-devices and sensors. Based on the AI development in 17 vertical markets, ABI Research, a global tech market advisory firm, estimates that the edge AI chipset market will grow from US$2.6 billion in 2019 to US$7.6 billion by 2024, with no vendor commanding more than 40% of the market. The frontrunner of this market is NVIDIA, with a 39% revenue share in the first half of 2019. The GPU vendor has a strong presence in key AI verticals that are currently leading in AI deployments, such as automotive, camera systems, robotics, and smart manufacturing.
Panasonic to Team up with IBM Japan in Improving Semiconductor Manufacturing Processes
On October 15, 2019, IBM Japan, Ltd. and Panasonic Corporation’s subsidiary, Panasonic Smart Factory Solutions Co., Ltd, announced that the companies have agreed to collaborate to develop and market a new high-value-added system to optimize the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of customers’ semiconductor manufacturing processes and to realize high-quality manufacturing. As part of its circuit formation process business, Panasonic currently develops and markets edge devices and manufacturing methods that contribute to improving semiconductor manufacturing of advanced packaging.
Creating 2D Heterostructures for Future Electronics
Nanomaterials could provide the basis of many emerging technologies, including extremely tiny, flexible, and transparent electronics. While many nanomaterials exhibit promising electronic properties, scientists and engineers are still working to best integrate these materials together to eventually create semiconductors and circuits with them. Northwestern Engineering researchers have created two-dimensional (2D) heterostructures from two of these materials, graphene and borophene, taking an important step toward creating intergrated circuits from these nanomaterials.
ClassOne’s Solstice CopperMax Plating System Chosen for MicroLink’s Advanced UAV Solar Cells
Semiconductor equipment manufacturer ClassOne Technology announced the sale of its Solstice® S8 electroplating system to MicroLink Devices, a manufacturer of advanced, lightweight, and flexible solar cells. The new 8-chambered Solstice equipment, designed specifically for ≤200mm processing, will be installed at the MicroLink facility in Niles, IL, where it will be used for electroplating of semiconductor based solar cells for use on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and space satellites. The announcement was made jointly by ClassOne Group CEO, Byron Exarcos, and MicroLink Devices CEO and President, Dr. Noren Pan.
