Shannon Davis

News and Web Editor

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Shannon, writes, edits and produces Semiconductor Digest’s news articles, email newsletters, blogs, webcasts, and social media posts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Huntington University in Huntington, IN. In addition to her years of freelance business reporting, Shannon has also worked in marketing and public relations in the renewable energy and healthcare industries.

Synopsys Design Platforms Enabled for Samsung Foundry 2.5D-IC Multi-Die Integration

Synopsys, Inc. today announced availability of design solutions to support Samsung Foundry’s 2.5D-IC Multi-Die Integration (MDI™) on its 7-nanometer (nm) LPP (Low Power Plus) with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, known as 7LPP. The Synopsys Fusion Design Platform™ and Custom Design Platform enable quicker design prototyping and analysis to help designers address the time-to-market pressures associated with delivery to accelerating markets, such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC).

Cadence 3D-IC Advanced Packaging Integration Flow Certified by Samsung Foundry for its 7LPP Process Technology

The use of multiple stacked chips in a single package is becoming a key trend for mobile, IoT and data center designs, which is also extending into the AI and 5G market segments due to the rapid and efficient integration of complete functions that can be implemented via the optimal process node into a system in package (SiP). The Cadence technology provides customers with analysis, implementation and physical verification capabilities within a single canvas and offers unique, early-stage system-level pathfinding and highly-complex design capabilities for 3D signoff. The Cadence flow has been optimized to enable customers to achieve all the benefits the Samsung Foundry MDI packaging technology has to offer in order to deliver new products to market with greater speed and agility.

Reducing Open-Circuit Voltage Loss in Organic Solar Cells

The power conversion efficiencies of organic solar cells (OSCs) based on blends of electron donor (D) and acceptor (A) semiconducting materials now exceed 16%. However, it is still lower than that of highly efficient inorganic SCs such as GaAs. The…

AKHAN Semiconductor Inc. Partners with Lockheed Martin to Validate Breakthrough Weapons Countermeasure Technology

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.