Top ten articles on eeNews Europe in May
As power fabs in Dresden and Catania get approval, the fate of an optoelectronics fab in the UK hangs in the balance in one of the top ten articles in May in eeNews Europe.
The fab in Newton Aycliffe has had a chequered history since it opened in 1991, originally making memory chips and now making compound semiconductors for Coherent. The loss of a contract with Apple has led to a strategic review this month at the site that cloud include another sale or closure
Microchip has launched a radiation tolerant version of its PolarFire FPGA with embedded RISC-V processors to boost the performance of AI and sensor analysis in low earth orbit for low cost satellites.
- Radiation-Tolerant RISC-V FPGA for Linux in space
- ARM, Linaro tackle edge compute interoperability with OneLab
ARM and Linaro have collaborated on a lab to boost the interoperability of edge compute hardware. OneLab should help the roll out of IoT and AI compute.
Researchers in Korea are extending meta materials from manipulating light to sound, while a team Sweden has developed a low cost zinc battery that uses lignin from trees for the carbon electrodes.
The latest market data has shown the first quarter to be a ‘train wreck’, and Malcom Penn of Future Horizons looks at the prospects for the rest of the year, including the immediate ban on chip sales to Huawei in the US.
- Analyst drops chip market forecast after 1Q24 “train wreck”
- Intel, Qualcomm confirm immediate US ban on IC sales to Huawei
One major news article for the month was the launch of the world’s largest neuromorphic AI supercomputer, to be based in Germany. With 10 billion neurons, the SpiNNaker2 system builds on a decade of research in Europe. The first half-sized version has There are 48 chips on a card, 90 cards in a rack and eight racks, giving a total of 5.25m ARM Cortex-M4F cores with additional processing for today’s AI transformer models.
The industry has a place in its collective heart for the 8bit Z80 microcontroller originally developed by Fredrico Fagin at Zilog after designing the Intel 4040. After nearly fifty years, the new owners, Littelfuse, are discontinuing the original chip, although the core lives on in many other products.
Open source designers have stepped up and are developing their own versions. One of these will tape out in the latest Tiny Tapeout 7 multi-project wafer (MPW) run later this year. Another MPW run is helping to continue Europe’s lead in graphene technologies at Graphenea Semiconductor.
The most read article in the top then this month was the coming share offering of Raspberry Pi. Staff are set to share a pot of up to £68m, while manufacturing partner Sony is planning a dedicated production line in Japan for the latest Raspberry Pi 5 boards. This could well be a key factor in the ramp up of 5G small cell units using the boards.
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