Creativity continues to drive innovation in the electronics industry, even during these difficult times. This week we are reporting on key developments from around the electronics industry: open-source technolgoy, Raspberry Pi news, semiconductor start-up funding, semiconductor sales, and electrical engineering graduate school enrollment. Here is your regular Electronics News Byte. 

Open-Source Tech and More

  • Open-Source Camera Stack for Raspberry Pi: Want better access to Raspberry Pi camera system? Want to customize a camera system? Well, now it is possible. Just days after announcing the new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, Raspberry Pi released an open-source camera stack RPi using libcamera. “We provide all the pieces for Raspberry Pi-based libcamera systems to work simply ‘out of the box,’” David Plowman reports on the Raspberry Pi blog. 
    Electronics News update: open-source tech and more
  • Semiconductor Start-up Funding Increases: According to a new report by Semico Research Corp., funding in semiconductor hardware start-ups has been increasing steadily since 2015. The firm reports that, between 2015 and Q1 2020, "startups identified with $100 million or less in funding had amassed a total of $1.3 billion." North America-based startups led the pack. Then came Europe-based companies and those in Asia. Startups focused on high-performance computing led the way, followed by automotive and IoT.
     
  • Chinese Semi Manufacturer Makes Top 10: HiSilicon is the first semiconductor supplier based in China to join the Top 10 list of semiconductor sales leaders. IC Insights is reporting that in Q1 2020, China-based HiSilicon became broke into the Top 10 with a 54% sales increase over Q1 2019; last year, the company was ranked 15th. US-based Intel topped the list, followed by South Korea-based Samsung and then Taiwan-based TSMC.
     
  • US EE/CS Graduate Enrollment Drops: According to SIA, the US National Science Foundation recently found that full-time graduate enrollment in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science has dropped since 2016. The data indicates that there has been a decrease in foreign graduate students while the number of US students has increased. In 2018, there were 24,242 US citizens and permanent residents, 68,361 foreign nationals, for a total of 92,603. The total was up to 101,519 in 2016.

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