August’s Top Picks: eeNews Europe Articles

August is typically a slow month across Europe, with engineers heading off the coast or to cabins in the woods, but the industry news always continues.

A digital twin for a French yacht is a seasonal tale, while new chips and IP were emerging through the month in the top articles.

Analyst Semiconductor Intelligence took the opportunity to shave its prediction for the 2024 chip market with 18% growth as it heads to around $600bn.

At the same time, the US officially published its plans for V2X vehicle communication applications with a number of pilot schemes over the next five years across the country.

HBM memory was also a trend in the month, with sk Hynix customizing its memory chips to reduce the memory bottleneck and boost performance by as much as 30x. Nvidia is aiming to use the next generation HBM4 devices for its coming Rubin and Vera chips, while IBM has developed a dedicated I/O processor block for its latest 5nm Telum AI chip to tackle the data movement challenge.

After nearly a decade, Infineon has also finally settled its lawsuit over the Qimonda memory spinout, and Fujitsu is renaming its memory business Ramxeed.

This month also saw the emergence from stealth of US startup Akeana, which is looking to take on ARM with RISC-V cores generated from a single SystemVerilog database. Given the response of ARM’s trademark consultants to the article, this is going to be a very interesting proposition going forwards.

Back in Europe, planned supercomputers will turn into AI factories, and Paragraf is ramping up production of graphene for electronics applications.

But it has been Intel’s continuing moves into automotive that caught the most interest among the top articles in August, with a dedicated graphics GPU chip for cars for software-enabled vehicles.