June 2017 - Semiconductor Engineering


The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Toshiba and its fab partner, Western Digital, have jointly rolled out a 96-layer 3D NAND product amid a legal dispute. The companies have developed prototype samples of a 96-layer 3D NAND device. Samples of the new 96-layer product, which is a 256 gigabit (32 gigabytes) device, is scheduled for release in the second half of 2017 and mass production is targeted for 2018. Separately, ... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Finance Trend Micro, the cybersecurity firm, announced a corporate venture fund of $100 million to invest in emerging technology markets, including the Internet of Things. Gartner estimates 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Products Cisco Jasper introduced the Control Center 7.0 IoT connectivity management platform, with advanced capabilities, premium services, ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor released new software for automated set-up of PCB DFT rules. The tool extracts relevant PCB design technology from the design data to determine the correct PCB technology classification, then maps the PCB classification to the constraints associated with the applicable manufacturing processes to run only the checks necessary for the design. IP Synopsys improved the convolu... » read more

EDA Moves Out Of The Shadows


EDA has long harbored ambitions that are larger than a piece of silicon. The engineering challenges being solved on a nanometric scale are remarkably similar to ones being solved at a much higher level—architectural design, layout, validation, verification, debug, thermal mapping, and a lot more. The problem, at least until recently, is that it has been difficult to gain a foothold in larg... » read more

Come Together Right Now Over… Virtual Prototypes


As a frequent traveler and gadgets enthusiast I love the concept of all my devices being connected. However, more often than not I experience a divide which is sometimes caused by bad software and sometimes caused by missing hardware interfaces. My recent frustration was related to my tablet missing a USB port to upload new maps to my GPS device. The GPS device became a divided, isolated pi... » read more

The Safe Road Trip Thanks To Formal Verification


School’s out, gas is cheap and families in the U.S. are piling into their cars or minivans to take the time-honored cross-country road trip. These days, kids in the backseat don’t need to entertain themselves by spotting the license plates from the 50 U.S. states or picking a fight with their brother or sister. Instead, they can be kept amused with the vehicle’s sophisticated entertainmen... » read more

Machine Learning Meets IC Design


Machine Learning (ML) is one of the hot buzzwords these days, but even though EDA deals with big-data types of issues it has not made much progress incorporating ML techniques into EDA tools. Many EDA problems and solutions are statistical in nature, which would suggest a natural fit. So why is it so slow to adopt machine learning technology, while other technology areas such as vision recog... » read more

Cutting CapEx, Not Capacity


‘The cloud’ has been an industry buzz word for some time now, and while the initial focus was on data storage and sharing - and spawned the likes of Dropbox – ‘cloud computing’ is currently the latest trend. For instance, Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), gives users access to servers and a range of applications. Storage is available as before but so too now are... » read more

ON Semiconductor Meets AEC Challenges With Electrothermal Analysis


By Justin Yerger, ON Semiconductor, and Ahmed Eisawy, Mentor, a Siemens Business ON Semiconductor is a leading provider of products for automotive applications that follow the Automotive Electronics Council (AEC Q-100-012) requirements for reliability characterization of smart power devices. In particular, Automotive Smart FET driver ICs present verification challenges when verifying short c... » read more

DAC 2017: A Glimpse Of How The Future Is Enabled


Last week’s Design Automation Conference in Austin gave great examples on how the future is enabled with next generation tools today. My favorite portions were Uhnder’s overview on “Agile Emulation” in the cloud, SirusXM’s presentation on how they used our portfolio of emulation and FPGA-based prototyping, the panel on “Smarter Verification” that I had organized and – of course ... » read more

← Older posts