DIALOG SEMICONDUCTOR, a leading provider of battery and power management, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and Industrial edge computing solutions and GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the world's leading specialty foundry, today announced that they have entered into an agreement in which Dialog licenses its Conductive Bridging RAM (CBRAM) technology to GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The resistive ram (ReRAM)-based technology was pioneered by Adesto Technologies which was recently acquired by Dialog Semiconductor in 2020. GLOBALFOUNDRIES will first offer Dialog's CBRAM as an embedded, non-volatile memory (NVM) option on its 22FDX platform, with the plan to extend to other platforms.

Dialog's proprietary and production proven CBRAM technology is a low power NVM solution designed to enable a range of applications from IoT and 5G connectivity to artificial intelligence (AI). Low power consumption, high read/write speeds, reduced manufacturing costs and tolerance for harsh environments make CBRAM particularly suitable for consumer, medical, and select industrial and automotive applications. Furthermore, CBRAM technology enables cost-effective embedded NVM for advanced technology nodes required for products in these markets.

Intel today unveiled the suite of new security features for the upcoming 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable platform, code-named "Ice Lake." Intel is doubling down on its Security First Pledge, bringing its pioneering and proven Intel Software Guard Extension (Intel SGX) to the full spectrum of Ice Lake platforms, along with new features that include Intel Total Memory Encryption (Intel TME), Intel Platform Firmware Resilience (Intel PFR) and new cryptographic accelerators to strengthen the platform and improve the overall confidentiality and integrity of data.

Data is a critical asset both in terms of the business value it may yield and the personal information that must be protected, so cybersecurity is a top concern. The security features in Ice Lake enable Intel's customers to develop solutions that help improve their security posture and reduce risks related to privacy and compliance, such as regulated data in financial services and healthcare.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions and high-performance storage, launches the CVN Guardian RGB DDR4 gaming memory for the latest AMD platforms and the WARHALBERD DDR4 memory for the 3rd generation AMD Ryzen platform and Intel desktop platforms. The COLORFUL CVN Guardian RGB Gaming Memory sports an eye-catching heat sink with an RGB lightbar that supports motherboard RGB sync. On the other hand, the WARHALBERD is a value-oriented DDR4 memory featuring CXMT memory modules for a wide application from gaming to office PCs.

The CVN Guardian RGB DDR4 gaming memory is the latest addition to the CVN family. Designed for gamers, the CVN Guardian sports a futuristic high-performance heat spreader with superb heat dissipation to ensure stable gaming performance. COLORFUL uses specially selected Hynix CJR memory modules that offer stable performance and excellent overclocking capabilities. The CVN Guardian Gaming Memory supports XMP 2.0 automatic overclocking function for a quick performance boost.

NVIDIA today announced a new kind of processor—DPUs, or data processing units—supported by DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture that enables breakthrough networking, storage and security performance.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's three-year DPU roadmap in today's GPU Technology Conference keynote. It features the new NVIDIA BlueField -2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit for building applications on DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

Intel Corp. and Lightbits Labs today announced an agreement to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of today's data center operators who are craving improved total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to stranded disk capacity and performance. This strategic partnership includes technical co-engineering, go-to-market collaboration and an Intel Capital investment in Lightbits Labs. Lightbits' LightOS product delivers high-performance shared storage across servers while providing high availability and read-and-write management designed to maximize the value of flash-based storage. LightOS, while being fully optimized for Intel hardware, provides customers with vastly improved storage efficiency and reduces underutilization while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure without compromising performance and simplicity.

Lightbits Labs will enhance its composable disaggregated software-defined storage solution, LightOS, for Intel technologies, creating an optimized software and hardware solution. The system will utilize Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel 3D NAND SSDs based on Intel QLC Technology, Intel Xeon Scalable processors with unique built-in artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration capabilities and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with Application Device Queues (ADQ) technology. Intel's leadership FPGAs for next-generation performance, flexibility and programmability will complement the solution.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the world's leading specialty foundry, announced today at its Global Technology Conference the next generation of its FDXTM platform, 22FDX+, to meet the ever-growing need for higher performance and ultra-low power requirements of connected devices. GF's industry-leading 22FDX (22 nm FD-SOI) platform has realized $4.5 billion in design wins, with more than 350 million chips shipped to customers around the world.

GF's new 22FDX+ builds on the company's 22FDX platform, offering a broader set of features that provide high performance, ultra-low power, and specialty features and capabilities for the newest generation of designs. The differentiated offering will further empower customers to create chips that are specifically optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, automotive, and satellite communications applications.

NUVIA, a leading-edge silicon design company, today announced the close of its Series B funding round, raising $240M. The funding round was led by Mithril Capital in partnership with Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (founders of Marvell Technology Group), funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC., and Temasek, with additional participation from Atlantic Bridge, Redline Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital. The closure of NUVIA's Series B round builds on a $53M Series A round, raised in November 2019. NUVIA was founded in February 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams, with the vision to create the world's leading server processor.

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) announced today that it was chosen to become TikTok's secure cloud technology provider. This technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom's recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.

"TikTok picked Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it's much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers," said Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison. "In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud.... Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score."

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in data storage and management solutions, today announced it is shipping 18 TB helium-based enterprise drives in volume as part of the Exos X18 family. The new drive delivers high performance and mass capacity for hyperscale data centers to efficiently and cost-effectively manage ever-increasing amounts of data. Additionally, Seagate's Enterprise Data Solutions launched the new Exos Application Platform (AP) 2U12 as well as a new controller for the company's AP 4U100 systems.

The need for hyperscale and cloud storage solutions continues to rise to unprecedented levels with the ever-increasing growth in data generation. According to a recent Seagate report, Rethink Data, enterprise data is expected to grow at an average rate of 42.2% over the next two years. The survey was conducted by IDC, which also forecast the global datasphere will reach a staggering 175ZB by 2025 in a previous IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate. The high-capacity Exos X18 supports this expanding need for data storage.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced Dr. Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD and an accomplished leader in advancing semiconductor technology, has been named the 2020 recipient of SIA's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. SIA presents the Noyce Award annually in recognition of a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy. Dr. Su will accept the award at the SIA Leadership Forum and Award Celebration, a virtual event that will take place on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020.

"A tremendous leader in our industry, Lisa Su has successfully advanced leading-edge semiconductor and high-performance computing technologies throughout her career as an accomplished business executive and engineer," said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. "Lisa's outstanding achievements have significantly strengthened the semiconductor industry and America's global technology leadership, and she has inspired and opened doors for countless others in tech along the way. On behalf of the SIA board of directors, it is my pleasure to announce Lisa as the 2020 Robert N. Noyce Award recipient in recognition of her impressive accomplishments."

Yangtze Memory Technology Company (YMTC), China's ambitious new memory manufacturer specializing in NAND flash, launched the first client-segment SSDs under its own brand, the PC005 Active series and the SC001 Active series. Rumors of YMTC developing its own brand SSDs surfaced first in June. Prior to that in May, it was reported that Phison could add support for YMTC NAND flash chips to variants of its existing SSD controllers, and so it's highly likely that the new YMTC SSDs use Phison-sourced controllers. Interestingly, the company deployed its first-generation Xtracking 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash chips instead of its 2nd generation 128-layer QLC chips.

The PC005 Active comes in the M.2-2280 form-factor with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface, leveraging the NVMe 1.3 protocol. The drive is available in 1 TB. 512 GB, and 256 GB capacities. All three variants read sequentially at speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s, wiring at up to 2,900 MB/s, up to 2,500 MB/s, and up to 1,200 MB/s, respectively. Their endurance is rated at 640 TBW for the 1 TB version, 320 TBW for the 512 GB, and 200 TBW for the 256 GB variant. All three are backed by 5-year warranties.

Underscoring its mission to enable the world to solve its biggest data challenges by building a data infrastructure with next-gen security, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today introduced the ArmorLock Security Platform. A data encryption platform that rethinks how data security should be done, the ArmorLock Security Platform was created to help with the diverse security demands of data-centric and content-critical storage use cases in industries as varied as finance, government, healthcare, IT enterprise, legal, and media and entertainment. As data security concerns continue to rise in visibility, Western Digital plans to apply the platform across a range of storage solutions.

The first product to leverage this advanced technology, the new G-Technology ArmorLock encrypted NVMe SSD, is designed to deliver an easy-to-use, high-performance, high-grade security storage solution for creators in the media and entertainment industry. Facing the threat of hijacked media files and leaked films, studios, agencies, and especially investors are demanding a better way to protect critical content. While much of the industry's focus has been on cloud security, data often remains vulnerable on the portable storage devices holding critical commercial content.

TSMC had been working super hard in the past few years and has been investing in lots of new technologies to drive the innovation forward. At TSMC's Technology Symposium held this week was, the company has presented various things like the update on its 12 nm node, as well as future plans for node development. One of the most interesting announcements made this week was TSMC's state and ownership of Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) machines. ASML, the maker of these EUV machines used to etch the pattern on silicon, has been the supplier of the Taiwanese company. TSMC has announced that they own an amazing 50% of all EUV machine installations.

What is more important is the capacity that the company achieves with it. It is reported that TSMC achieves 60% of all EUV wafer capacity in the world, which is a massive achievement of what TSMC can do with the equipment. The company right now has only two nodes on EUV in high-volume manufacturing, the 7 nm+ node and 5 nm node (which is going HVM in Q4), however, that is more than any of its competitors. All of the future nodes are to be manufactured using the EUV machines and the smaller nodes require it. As far as the competitors go, only Samsung is currently making EUV silicon on the 7 nm LPP node. Intel is yet to release some products on a 7 nm node of its own, which is the first EUV node from the company.

Arm today announced a three-year partnership agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), establishing an access framework to all commercially available Arm technology. With DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative gaining momentum, the new agreement will enable the research community that supports DARPA's programs to quickly and easily take advantage of Arm's leading IP, tools and support, accelerating innovation in a variety of fields.

"The span of DARPA research activity opens up a huge range of opportunities for future technological innovation," said Rene Haas, president, IP Products Group, Arm. "Our expanded DARPA partnership will provide them with access to the broadest range of Arm technology to develop compute solutions supported by the world's largest ecosystem of tools, services and software."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the immediate availability of its silicon-proven 3D IC packaging technology, eXtended-Cube (X-Cube), for today's most advanced process nodes. Leveraging Samsung's through-silicon via (TSV) technology, X-Cube enables significant leaps in speed and power efficiency to help address the rigorous performance demands of next-generation applications including 5G, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, as well as mobile and wearable.

"Samsung's new 3D integration technology ensures reliable TSV interconnections even at the cutting-edge EUV process nodes," said Moonsoo Kang, senior vice president of Foundry Market Strategy at Samsung Electronics. "We are committed to bringing more 3D IC innovation that can push the boundaries of semiconductors."

The University of Florida and NVIDIA Tuesday unveiled a plan to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer in academia, delivering 700 petaflops of AI performance. The effort is anchored by a $50 million gift: $25 million from alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and $25 million in hardware, software, training and services from NVIDIA.

"We've created a replicable, powerful model of public-private cooperation for everyone's benefit," said Malachowsky, who serves as an NVIDIA Fellow, in an online event featuring leaders from both the UF and NVIDIA. UF will invest an additional $20 million to create an AI-centric supercomputing and data center.

According to the report from The Wall Street Journal, we have obtained information that SoftBank, owner of Arm Holdings, is considering a future of Arm Holdings without SoftBank's ownership. The report is indicating that SoftBank can either sell its subsidiary or make it go to public with Initial Public Offering (IPO). If we recall, SoftBank has purchased Arm Holdings in 2016 for 32 billion USD, and the company is potentially worth much more today. Arm Holdings was established as a joint between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and VLSI Technology. The news of SoftBank selling Arm Holdings is coming just after Apple decided to make a Mac based on Arm ISA.

The report from WSJ says that the market interest for such acquisition is unknown, so there is a big possibility that SoftBank will ultimately do nothing and just keep the company. My speculations could be that Apple may have an interest in the company since it is using its royalties and intellectual property. If such a thing happens Apple would be forced to sign a deal by antitrust regulators that force the company to continue offering to license the ISA. After all, Apple was one of the founding members of the joint venture. The possibility of that is of course very low. If another option such as IPO happens, the company would still be in ownership of SoftBank, it would just go to the public trading market.

Today xMEMS Labs emerged from stealth mode to reinvent sound with the introduction of Montara, the world's first monolithic true MEMS speaker, delivering high fidelity, full-bandwidth sound and low total harmonic distortion (THD) for sealed in-ear personal audio devices, including true wireless stereo (TWS) earbuds. Montara is also the world's first IP-57 rated microspeaker, enabling water and dust-resistant earbuds. Consumers will benefit from enhanced audio fidelity with raised levels of clarity and detail for instruments and vocals, extremely low latency, waterproof earbuds, and longer listening times.

"With on-the-go media consumption on the rise such as subscription music, podcasts, video, audiobooks and mobile gaming, consumers are increasingly demanding enhanced audio quality and extended listen times between charges," said Joseph Jiang co-founder and CEO. "Until now, the industry has relied on antiquated, centuries-old multi-component voice coil speakers requiring labor-intensive, high variability factory assembly lines. Our revolutionary Montara product is a game changer for delivering a new combination of audio fidelity, size, energy consumption and uniformity not possible with traditional voice coil approaches."

MediaTek, the world's 4th largest global fabless semiconductor company, today launched its newest chips in the smartphone gaming-focused G series - the MediaTek Helio G25 and G35. The latest chips feature MediaTek HyperEngine game technology for faster, smoother performance, enhanced power efficiency, and brilliant graphics.

The new chipsets always keep you connected and deliver the lowest latency gaming experience. They also offer enhanced imaging features, making these G-series chipsets a perfect fit for photography enthusiasts and gamers alike.

The European Hardware Association (EHA), comprised of the nine largest independent technology news and review websites on the continent, has announced its hardware winners for 2020. And AMD has completely blindsided its competition in all possible metrics, whether you're talking about the GPU or CPU side of the equation. AMD's CPU division has completely razed Intel's offerings when it comes to awards, with no Intel CPU even being credited with a single prize. AMD's Ryzen 3000 series won the most-desired award in the form of the "Product of the Year" award. The Ryzen 3000 chiplet design in itself won the EHA "Best Technology" Award; and more specifically, AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X took home the "Best CPU" prize; the Ryzen 5 3600 won "Best Gaming Product"; and the Ryzen 3 3300X won "Best Overclocking Product".

But AMD didn't stop in the CPU category, besting even rival NVIDIA in the GPU side of the equation. AMD's Navi 10 GPU, used in the Radeon RX 5700 series, has won the "Best GPU" category, while the "Best AMD-based graphics card" award goes to the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ (the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC won "Best NVIDIA Graphics Card" category). Another AMD-inside design won the "Best Gaming Notebook" Award - ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14, which packs AMD's mobile Renoir CPUs inside.

AMD today announced it has exceeded its moonshot 25x20 goal set in 2014 to improve the energy efficiency of its mobile processors 25 times by 2020. The new AMD Ryzen 7 4800H mobile processor improves on the energy efficiency of the 2014 baseline measurement by 31.7 times1, and offers leadership performance2 and extraordinary efficiency for laptop PCs. Greater energy efficiency leads to significant user benefits including improved battery life, better performance, lower energy costs and reduced environmental impact from computing.

"We have always focused on energy efficiency in our processors, but in 2014 we decided to put even greater emphasis on this capability," said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer and executive vice president, Technology and Engineering at AMD. "Our engineering team rallied around the challenge and charted a path to reach our stretch goal of 25 times greater energy efficiency by 2020. We were able to far surpass our objective, achieving 31.7 times improvement leading to gaming and ultrathin laptops with unmatched performance, graphics and long battery life. I could not be prouder of our engineering and business teams."

Intel today announced that systems designer-extraordinaire Jim Keller has departed the company citing personal reasons. Whether or not this is a blow to Intel likely depends on how far Jim Keller brought their Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group throughout his two-year tenure at the company whilst serving as its Vice President. The semiconductor and chip architecture world isn't being driven by Mr. Keller himself, obviously; there are a number of architects and designers that bring the industry forward through their concerted efforts. However, it's hard to look past Jim Keller's pedigree when it comes to doing his job - if anything, AMD's Zen architecture is a testament to that, and has put Intel in the place we now see it in the CPU world.

To fill in the void, Intel has announced a reshuffling inside their Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group. Jim Keller will still be serving with Intel for the next six months as a consultant, thus easing the transition. Read the full press-release below.