TOKYO — The Japanese semiconductor industry’s downfall – by way of a slow death over the past quarter century — is undeniable and well documented. Theories about why Japan’s semi industry fell apart are many. But the single reality facing Japanese semiconductor firms is this: They no longer matter in the global market. Tracing the…
The early January Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show is becoming an increasingly common place for cellular industry-targeting chip, software, and systems companies to ply their newest wares. Yet the late February Barcelona-based Mobile World Congress (MWC) show remains the dominant conference for wireless applications. This year's event takes place next week, February 22-25 to be…
The cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are making inroads with large enterprises because they promise better, faster, lower total cost of ownership ways to apply information technology to procurement and supply chain problems that have never been adequately addressed. As these deployments grow in size, complexity and strategic importance, the risk of failure increases as well.…
Over 100 organizations supply equipment or consumables to enable manufacturing of flexible or printed electronics. The majority of these organizations are based in Europe, followed by a roughly even share of U.S. and Asian-based companies combined. Within Europe, Germany is home to more equipment makers than other European countries. But as European funding saturates, the…
The concept of the Turing test was first mooted by the legendary Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence . The idea is that a conversation takes place between a human and a machine using a text-only channel like a computer keyboard and screen. In the classical form of this test, an…
Used properly, analytics, predictive analytics, data science, and machine learning can get beyond being just buzzwords, and be leveraged as critical tools in sales and operations planning (S&OP) in the supply chain. S&OP is a continuous business process that enables firms of all types, from electronics OEMs hospitals, and from auto makers to chemical firms,…
PORTLAND, Oregon — Scientists trying to fulfill the 80-year-old dream of Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, recently discovered how to place crystalline lattices of pure electrons in the bottom of a silicon-encased quantum well. The resulting material promises electron mobility more than 200 times greater than that of graphene and more than 1,700 times that of…
Despite challenges in the semiconductor industry, innovation continues. The evolution and refinement of a variety processes, memory technologies, and packaging technologies are creating new technology frontiers. Today, I want to take a look at some of the most interesting evolutions in the space. Silicon On Insulator (SOI) is a process technology developed to extend performance…
PORTLAND, Ore. — First computers beat the best of us at chess, then poker, and finally Jeopardy. The next hurdle is image recognition — surely a computer can't do that as well as a human. Check that one off the list, too. Now Microsoft has programmed the first computer to beat the humans at image…
Well, it's a funny old world when it comes to coincidences, isn’t it? For example, I just received an email from my Chum Adam Carlson (a.k.a. Aeroengineer) saying that he hopes to have some interesting news to report on his Desktop Pick-&-Place (P&P) machine in the not-so-distant future (see Unknown Document 1322807 ).