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Building leading-edge fabs outside Asia: yea or nay?

Westerns governments are no longer comfortable leaving leading-edge chip manufacturing to Asian companies. But is subsidizing fabs the solution? It’s a precarious dilemma.

Dutch Meteoriet consortium tackles MEMS testing bottleneck

A consortium of ‘neighboring’ companies and research institutes aims to develop an all-electric, universal MEMS testing solution suitable for all volumes.

Hot topics in IC and electronic system testing – from all angles

The upcoming IEEE European Test Symposium brings together professors, students, key suppliers and industrial users of test equipment and design-for-test software in an online setting.

How a strange insect put Philips on the litho path

The chip that Piet Haaijman brought from Silicon Valley to Philips’ Natlab in 1962 caused the sense of urgency needed to invest in lithography.

Manufacturing a log cabin

Angelo Hulshout has the ambition to bring the benefits of production agility to the market and set up a new business around that. Time to make shinchoku – progress.

In other news

Philips reports strong sales growth and profitability improvement (press release)
Taiwan minister plays down chances for chip production in EU (Reuters)
TSMC surpasses Intel to become world’s most valuable chipmaker (WCCF Tech)
Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550M (Techcrunch)
How autonomous vehicles could help the elderly and disabled in the near future (Techrepublic)

Bits&Chips podcasts: Jorijn van Duijn (part 1)

René Raaijmakers talks to the innovators driving the high-tech industry. Listen (in Dutch) to researchers, developers and decision-makers speak about trends, technology, business and their motivations. In edition 13 of the Bits&Chips podcast, tech historian Jorijn van Duijn on Arthur del Prado, the godfather of Dutch high tech (part 1).

Even exponential growth requires patience

While we wait for technologies like quantum computing and integrated photonics to ‘explode,’ it’s good to realize that they’ve actually been on an exponential growth trajectory for decades already.

Rule 5: Lean into the future

We tend to be more conservative than what’s helpful in a rapidly changing and evolving digital world. We need to create time to purposelessly explore new ideas and technologies and intentionally break habits that are holding us back.