Automotive manufacturers are reducing their production of vehicles because of the worldwide shortage in critical microchips, partly caused by the Trump administration's restrictions on doing business with Chinese companies, according to industry officials. Peter Wennink, the CEO of ASML, the world's largest supplier of advanced lithography systems for chip fabrication, sees Washington's hostile stance toward trade with China continuing with the advent of the Biden administration.
Makers of computer chips are seeing strong demand from manufacturers across industries, creating supply issues that won't be easy to resolve because of lengthy development and production cycles. Contract chip manufacturers are being asked to increase production and investment as a result.
QuantumScape and other companies are competing to improve the longevity and performance of batteries going into electric vehicles, Scott Patterson and Ben Foldy write. Fixing the dendrite issue in lithium-ion batteries will go a long way in achieving that goal, they note.
Intel brought out four new systems in its Next Unit of Computing product line. The Phantom Canyon NUC pairs a "Tiger Lake" CPU with Nvidia's RTX 2060 graphics card, while the NUC 11 Enthusiast system updates the NUC 8 Hades Canyon release from 2018.
Seagate Technology introduced a hard-disk drive capable of storing up to 20 terabytes of data, with the possibility of expanding the HDD to store 30TB and 50TB. The HDD uses heat-assisted magnetic recording technology and is meant for use in enterprises as an alternative to solid-state drives.
Functional verification in the IC design process faces a number of technical challenges in the near future, Brian Bailey writes. Neil Hand of Siemens EDA (formerly known as Mentor Graphics) says, "Verification today utilizes a whole suite of tools, including data analytics, where you are looking at how to take this big sea of data and make it actionable for the verification engineer."
