Improving Chip Efficiency, Reliability, And Adaptability


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits' Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new models and approaches for ensuring the integrity and responsiveness of systems, and how this can be done within a given power budget and at various speeds. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are y... » read more

A Practical Approach To DFT For Large SoCs And AI Architectures, Part I


The traditional processors designed for general-purpose applications struggle to meet the computing demands and power budgets of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine leaning (ML) applications. Several semiconductor design companies are now developing dedicated AI/ML accelerators that are optimized for specific workloads such that they deliver much higher processing capabilities with much low... » read more

AI Testing: Pushing Beyond DFT Architectures


Every day, more applications are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) system to increase automation beyond traditional systems. The continuous growth in computing demands of AI systems require designers to develop massive, highly parallel AI processor chips. Their large sizes and types of applications have a significant impact on their design and test methodologies. With thousands of repeated... » read more

AI Chips Driving Need For New Test Implementation Methodologies


Artificial intelligence has never been more in the news than it is today.  From picking stock market investments to autonomous driving, we have heard about what AI can do when it works and what happens when it goes awry. The consequences are huge if AI doesn’t work which puts a lot of pressure on hardware engineers to ensure that their chips can be extensively tested for proper and safe func... » read more

The Single Best DFT Move You Can Make


A proven method to simplify a complex problem is to break it into smaller chunks. In the case of today’s large, complex SoCs, this means using hierarchical methods to design the blocks, then combine the results at the top level. While this sounds obvious, it hasn’t always been practical or technologically feasible to perform some tasks, like DFT, at the block level and translate that work s... » read more

Test Challenges Grow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss current and future test challenges with Dave Armstrong, director of business development at Advantest; Steve Pateras, product marketing director for Silicon Test Solutions at Mentor Graphics; Robert Ruiz, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys; Mike Slessor, president of FormFactor; and Dan Glotter, chief executive of Optimal+. SE: In our ... » read more