Author's Latest Posts


Automotive OEMs Focus On SDVs, Zonal Architectures


Giant automotive OEMs are re-evaluating how quickly to move to advanced technologies and software-driven designs amid crushing financial pressure from low-cost EVs developed in other markets such as China. U.S., European, and Japanese OEMs have been struggling for the past half-decade or so to figure out which is the best approach to developing EVs, undergoing multiple shifts in both hardwar... » read more

Chiplets Make Progress Using Interconnects As Glue


Breaking up SoCs into their component parts and putting those and other pieces together in some type of heterogeneous assembly is beginning to take shape, fueled by advances in interconnects, complex partitioning, and industry learnings about what works and what doesn't. While the vision of plug-and-play remains intact, getting there is a lot more complicated than initially imagined. It can ... » read more

Mass Customization For AI Inference


Rising complexity in AI models and an explosion in the number and variety of networks is leaving chipmakers torn between fixed-function acceleration and more programmable accelerators, and creating some novel approaches that include some of both. By all accounts, a general-purpose approach to AI processing is not meeting the grade. General-purpose processors are exactly that. They're not des... » read more

Managing Legacy In Automotive


Experts At The Table: The automotive ecosystem is in the midst of an intense evolution as OEMs and tiered providers grapple with how to deal with legacy technology while incorporating ever-increasing levels of autonomy, electrification, software defined vehicle concepts, just to name a few. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Wayne Lyons, senior dir... » read more

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era


The widespread adoption of chiplets in domain-specific applications is creating a partitioning challenge that is much more complex than anything chip design teams have dealt with in previous designs. Nearly all the major systems companies, packaging houses, IDMs, and foundries have focused on chiplets as the best path forward to improve performance and reduce power. Signal paths can be short... » read more

Balancing Programmability And Performance In Cars


The rate of change in the automotive industry is accelerating with the shift toward software-defined vehicles and ongoing advancements in algorithms and chip architectures. The challenge now is to figure out the best way to prevent rapid obsolescence, improve safety, and keep the cost of these changes to a minimum. Today, updatable automotive hardware is typically achieved through FPGAs, but... » read more

Developing Workflows To Streamline System-Level Design


Experts At The Table: One of the big challenges facing EDA companies is explaining to customers what's possible, how to streamline their designs, and what can be accomplished at what level of risk. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about how relationships are fundamentally changing between EDA companies and their customers Michal Siwinski, chief marketing officer at Arteris; Chris Muet... » read more

Power Delivery Challenged By Data Center Architectures


Processor and data center architectures are changing in response to the higher voltage needs of servers running AI and large language models (LLMs). At one time, servers drew a few hundred watts for operation. But over the past few decades that has changed drastically due to a massive increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed and user demands to do it more quickly. NVIDIA's G... » read more

Focus Shifts To Application-Specific Workloads


Experts At The Table: EDA has undergone numerous workflow changes over time. Different skill sets have come into play over the years, and at times this changed the definition of what it means to design at the system level. To work out what this means for designers today, and how it looks going forward, Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Michal Siwinski, chief marketing officer at Arteris; ... » read more

Chip Security Now Depends On Widening Supply Chain


Securing chips is becoming more challenging as SoCs are disaggregated into chiplets, creating new vulnerabilities that involve hardware and software, as well as multiple entities, and extending threats across a much broader supply chain. In the past, much of the cyber threat model was confined to either hardware or software, and where multiple vendors were involved, various chips were separa... » read more

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