Review of the week: conception, low consumption

Magnachip will be acquired by Capital of the wise road for $ 1.4 billion, by privatizing the NYSE-listed company. The company designs and manufactures OLED display driver integrated circuits and a range of power management integrated and discrete circuits. Magnachip’s management team and employees are expected to continue in their roles and the company will remain based in Cheongju, Seoul, and Gumi, South Korea. The all-cash transaction, priced at $ 29 per share, is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

Arms presented its new architecture Arm v9. Security is at the center of concerns, with the company announcing the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), which protects portions of code and data from being accessed or modified during use, even from privileged software, by performing calculations in a secure, hardware-based environment. Another key area is the extension of Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction set used as an extension of AArch64, to enable flexible vector length implementations. SVE2 extends the SVE instruction set to enable areas of data processing beyond HPC and ML to applications such as computer vision, LTE baseband processing, genomics and database in memory. With v9, Arm expects an increase in processor performance of more than 30% over the next two generations of mobile processors and infrastructure, as well as an increase in frequency, bandwidth and speed. cache size, and reduced memory latency.

Siemens software for digital industries unveiled its latest hardware-assisted verification system. New products in the Veloce family include HYCON for virtual platform / software based verification; Strato +, an upgrade to the Veloce Strato hardware emulator with a capacity roadmap of up to 15 billion doors; Primo for enterprise-level FPGA prototyping that extends up to 320 FPGAs; and proFPGA for desktop FPGA prototyping with a modular approach to capacity. To ease the transition between products, Veloce Strato + and Primo use the same RTL, the same virtual verification environment, as well as the same transactors and templates to maximize the reuse of verification media, environment and test content.

Imperas software has released riscvOVPsimCOREV, a free instruction set simulator (ISS) based on the Imperas reference models of the OpenHW group’s RISC-V Core IP processor. The ISS can be configured for the full range of the OpenHW CORE-V processor IP portfolio, including the RTL frozen CV32E40P (formerly known as PULP RI5CY), the CV32E40S and CV32E40X under development, as well as the next CVA6-32 / 64 bits (formerly PULP ARIANE), and will be extended in time to cover the future CORE-V roadmap.

A new agreement allows DARPA-access to funded research programs Tortuga Logic Radix technology through the DARPA Toolbox, enabling proactive security verification and assurance measures for the semiconductor chip development process. “This program will remove all barriers to bring Tortuga’s security design lifecycle platform to the DARPA community. Additionally, it will expand visibility into how FPGAs, ASICs, and SoCs can be proactively secured during the chip design process, long before these devices see the light of day, ”said Brian Walsh, Sales Manager for Tortuga Logic. DARPA Toolbox is an initiative to provide access to commercially available tools and intellectual property for DARPA sponsored research.

Codasip and Check security have teamed up to provide secure boot functionality for Codasip Low Power Embedded RISC-V processors. New security features are enabled by Veridify’s quantum resistance security methods which can confirm that the firmware used by these processors during the boot process is genuine. It can also be used to enable additional security features such as secure firmware updates, authentication, and data protection. The security functions will be available in the second half of 2021.

Market research firm IC Insights predicts that sales of optoelectronics, sensors and actuators, and discrete semiconductors (OSDs) will grow 13% to $ 99.4 billion this year, with a 10% increase in 2022 to $ 109.1 billion of dollars. “Optoelectronics sales in 2020 were slowed by the decline in LED-dominated lamp devices (-6%), infrared devices (-4%) and light sensors (-3%) despite strong growth in laser emitters (+ 10%) and a slight increase in CMOS image sensors (+ 4%). Total sensor sales increased 8% in 2020, while actuator revenues increased 15%, in part due to strong demand for MEMS-based RF filters in smartphones and wireless systems, ”notes The report.

Events
Find a new conference or learning opportunity on our events page, or watch an upcoming webinar.

SEMI’s MEMS & Sensors Technical Congress will be held April 13-15. The GSA Silicon Leadership Summit will be held April 14-15. The Linley Spring Processor Conference 2021 will take place April 19-23. From April 20 to 22, several events will take place: SNUG World by Synopsys, Simulation World by Ansys and Industry Strategy Symposium Europe 2021. The IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits (CICC 2021) conference will close the month from April 25 to 30. .