The closing of the acquisition of Dialog, following the landmark acquisitions of Intersil and IDT, reinforces Renesas as a premier embedded solution provider.

Synopsys has announced a collaboration with TSMC to develop a broad portfolio of DesignWare Interface IP, Logic Libraries and Embedded Memories for the TSMC N7+ FinFET process.

NVIDIA has announced plans to cease developing drivers supporting 32-bit operating systems for any GPU architecture in the near future. All NVIDIA GPU drivers published after the release 390 (due in early 2018) will only support x86-64 OSes. The decision marks an important milestone in the transition of the PC industry to 64-bit computing that has been ongoing for over a decade, but may upset some of the users who still run older machines or those that require drivers for embedded systems.

Samsung will describe a 7nm SRAM made with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February. Other ISSCC papers will detail memories, sensors and processors spanning everything from fast DRAMs to location trackers embedded in a boot.

Earlier this year, Elan Microelectronics partnered with smart card integrator Jinco Universal and KSID to develop smart cards with an embedded fingerprint sensor.

NXP will ship this year as many as five SoCs made in Samsung's 28nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process, including one that has been sampling for six months. Samsung is expected to announce its FD-SOI roadmap in May and is already working on RF and in-house embedded MRAM for it.

Texas Instruments laid off a small but undisclosed number of people mainly in Silicon Valley as part of a restructuring of its Analog and Embedded Processing groups. No products will be eliminated in the reorg.

The Crossbar ReRAM for embedded non-volatile memory applications is in production at partner foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) using a 40nm CMOS process and is sampling to SMIC customers, according to Sylvain Dubois, Crossbar's VP of strategic marketing and business development.

Power component designer Sarda Technologies in the US is teaming up with Asian assembly firm UTAC to use its Heterogeneous Integrated Power Stage (HIPS) in UTAC's 3D SiP based on technology from German embedded board provider AT&S to improve the energy efficiency of data centers.

Now that the Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be firmly embedded in our lives, 2016 may be that transformational year when it segues from the "gee whiz" arena into practical, everyday application - along with all that entails in regard to development, policy and standards.

Microchip Technology through its Silicon Storage Technology (SST) subsidiary and Globalfoundries have announced the full qualification and availability of SST's 55nm embedded SuperFlash non-volatile memory (NVM) on Globalfoundries' 55nm Low Power Extended (LPx)/ RF enabled platform.

Toshiba has developed what it claims is the world's fastest device controller for embedded NAND flash memory modules compliant with the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver.2.0 and UFS Unified Memory Extension (UME) Ver.1.0 standards defined by JEDEC Solid State Technology Association (JEDEC).

Renesas Electronics has developed what it claims is the industry's first 28-nanometer (nm) flash memory intellectual property (IP) for microcontrollers (MCUs) using a 28nm process technology.

United Microelectronics (UMC) has surpassed 15 million shipments for customer small display driver ICs (SDDI) manufactured using the foundry's 55nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology.

Spansion and United Microelectronics (UMC) have announced the joint development of a 40nm process that integrates UMC's 40nm LP logic process with Spansion proprietary embedded Charge Trap (eCT) Flash memory technology. As part of this non-exclusive agreement, UMC is licensed to manufacture products based on this technology for Spansion.

SanDisk has announced that the iNAND Extreme Embedded Flash Drive (EFD) supports tablet reference designs based on the Nvidia Tegra 4.

Toshiba has subsequently brought this high level performance to its original microcontrollers and to ARM core-based microcontrollers. The newly-developed NANO Flash-100 achieves a zero-wait cycle during random access at 100MHz operation.

Agilent Technologies has launched the N6465A test application for embedded multimedia card (eMMC) compliance test in response to a new version of the JEDEC eMMC specification.

Embedded and consumer markets and a broadening porfolio of flash memory devices will continue to drive increased business for memory maker Spansion in the coming months, but global economic uncertainty marked by political change is dampening industry growth, Spansion CEO John Kispert said Thursday (Oct. 25).

Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) has announced the availability of its 1.2-volt low-power embedded EEPROM platform, which is fully compatible with its 0.13-micron low-leakage (LL) process.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon weighs in at less than three pounds, has an exterior made of extremely lightweight carbon fiber material, boasts optional embedded 3G connectivity for anywhere, anytime Internet access, and relies on a 256GB2 SanDisk X100 SSD for incredibly responsive, small form factor storage.

NXP Semiconductors has announced that the newly launched Nexus 7 will feature its PN65 NFC solution to provide an amazing mobile user experience. Featuring an NFC radio controller and an embedded Secure Element, the PN65 is validated and integrated on the latest release of Android 4.1, Jelly Bean.

The massive gray market for cellphones is propelling sales of lower-cost flash memories like embedded multimedia card (eMMC) and serial peripheral interface (SPI) NOR, as manufacturers of the unregulated phones strive to keep production costs low, according to IHS iSuppli.

Texas Instruments (TI) announced it has shipped nearly 6.5 billion units of copper wire bonding technology in its analog, embedded processing and wireless products. This milestone underscores TI's confidence in copper as a viable replacement to gold in its semiconductor product roadmaps.

"We delivered a solid fourth quarter amid challenging market conditions," said company president and CEO John Kispert. "2011 was a year of transition and intense product development. Spansion is now well-positioned for growth in the future in areas such as automotive, industrial, communications and gaming..."

The largest trade show and conference for embedded system designers and managers will be held in Yokohama, Japan, from November 16-18.

An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.

The beauty of these system-on-chip architectures is that they can be placed in very tight spaces. This obviously impacts case designs.

With the embedded DisplayPort 1.3 interface (eDP 1.3), VESA, the Video Standards Association behind DisplayPort, came up with a new idea, the Panel Self Refresh (PSR).

SanDisk has implemented the new SATA 繕SSD specification into its SanDisk iSSD product line of postage stamp-sized embedded SSDs.

Spansion has announced a collaboration with Freescale on a memory expansion module for the Freescale Tower System that provides design engineers more flexibility in prototyping a growing range of embedded applications.

Under the agreement, IBM receives a five-year license to certain of Misaud patents. IBM's processor and ASIC products that contain embedded DRAM are licensed under the agreement.

This new investment round was led by Intel Capital and includes new funding from strategic investors and Anobit's current investors. Anobit is a provider of NAND-based products and systems ranging from embedded flash controllers to enterprise-class SSD.

"With the Embedded Initiative, Altera is enabling designers in markets such as automotive, industrial, military and wireless to easily leverage a rich ecosystem of processor, OS and IP support all through a single design flow, and to reduce overall system cost..."