By Stephen Breit, Senior Director, MEMS Business, Coventor, a Lam Research Company Self-driving cars have been all the rage in both the trade and popular press in recent years. I prefer the term “autonomous vehicles,” which more broadly captures the possibilities, encompassing not only small passenger vehicles but mass transit and industrial vehicles as well. Depending on who’s talking, we will all be riding in fully autonomous vehicles in five…
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MEMS Fabrication: Growth-Enabler or Industry Roadblock?
By D.Sc.(Tech.) Heikki Holmberg, senior development manager technology, Okmetic Oy The MEMS industry has huge growth potential. Will MEMS fabrication act as a bottleneck to continued expansion or a critical conduit to achieving that potential? Slow development cycles, multiple fabrication platforms and high cost for small R&D volumes are barriers to rapid development of new products. Understanding the special features of MEMS fabrication — with its many ecosystem options —…
AI and MEMS Sensors: A Critical Pairing
By Kaustubh Gandhi, Senior Product Manager, Bosch Sensortec Artificial intelligence (AI) is making headlines everywhere, offering a range of capabilities, including location and motion awareness — determining whether a user is sitting, walking, running or sleeping. Behind the scenes, AI is capturing volumes of data. Makers of smartphones and fitness and sports trackers, along with application developers, are all clamoring for this data because it helps them analyze real-world user…
What’s Next for Smart Speakers? Smarter Microphones
By Matt Crowley, CEO, Vesper Technologies Smart speakers and voice assistants are already a big part of everyday life for many of us. Improvement in speech recognition accuracy obtained from advancements in natural language processing, machine learning and cloud computing technologies is driving the success of voice assistants. We’re asking Siri to play music, Alexa to order kitchen supplies and OK, Google for the weather. The world’s largest consumer electronics…
AI Focus of The ConFab
Artificial Intelligence will be a focus of The ConFab 2018, to be held May 20-23 at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. We’ll hear from a variety of speakers on why A.I. is so important to the semiconductor industry, not only in terms of the new types of chips that will be required, but how A.I. will bring dramatic improvements to the semiconductor manufacturing process. “The exciting results of AI have…
Join Us at The ConFab 2018
The ConFab 2018, to be held May 20-23 at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, is a conference and networking event designed to inform and connect leading semiconductor executives from all parts of the supply chain. Now in its 14th year, it is produced by Solid State Technology magazine, the semiconductor industry’s oldest and most respected business publication. The goal of The ConFab this year is to show how today’s semiconductor…
Process Watch: The (automotive) problem with semiconductors
By David W. Price, Douglas G. Sutherland and Jay Rathert Author’s Note: The Process Watch series explores key concepts about process control—defect inspection, metrology and data analysis—for the semiconductor industry. This article is the first in a five-part series on semiconductors in the automotive industry. In this article, we introduce some of the challenges involved in the automotive supply chain. Future articles in the series will address specific process control…
The ConFab 2018 Update
A new wave of growth is sweeping through the semiconductor industry, propelled by a vast array of new applications, including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, automotive, 5G, the IoT, cloud computing, healthcare and many others. The big question facing today’s semiconductor manufacturers and their suppliers is how can they best position themselves to take advantage of this tremendous growth. Finding answers to that question is the goal of The…
Mott Memristor Chaos could make Efficient AI
Congratulations to Suhas Kumar, John Paul Strachan, and R. Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto for showing not just how to make a Mott memristor, but that you can create controlled chaos with one. “We showed that this type of memristor can generate chaotic and nonchaotic signals,” says Williams, who invented the memristor based on theory by Leon Chua. An analysis of the material science and engineering…
The ConFab 2018 will be held May 20-23
The ConFab 2018, to be held May 20-23 in Las Vegas, will take a close look at the new applications driving the semiconductor industry, the technology that will be required at the device and process level to meet new demands, and – perhaps most importantly – the kind of strategic collaboration that will be required. It is this combination of business, technology and social interactions that make The ConFab so…
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