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Ann Mutschler

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Ann Mutschler is senior executive editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Using ICs To Shrink Auto’s Carbon Footprint
By Ann Mutschler - 03 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 3

A large portion of the burden for reducing greenhouse gases is being handed off to makers of automotive chips and systems, which are being tasked to make vehicles drive further using less energy and with zero emissions. The effort is critical in battling climate change. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the transportation sector represented 28.2% of 2018 greenhouse gas e... » read more

Forward And Backward Compatibility In IC Designs
By Ann Mutschler - 30 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Future-proofing of designs is becoming more difficult due to the accelerating pace of innovation in architectures, end markets, and technologies such as AI and machine learning. Traditional approaches for maintaining market share and analyzing what should be in the next rev of a product are falling by the wayside. They are being replaced by best-guesses about market trends and a need to bala... » read more

Using AI And Bugs To Find Other Bugs
By Ann Mutschler - 24 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Debug is starting to be rethought and retooled as chips become more complex and more tightly integrated into packages or other systems, particularly in safety- and mission-critical applications where life expectancy is significantly longer. Today, the predominant bug-finding approaches use the ubiquitous constrained random/coverage driven verification technology, or formal verification techn... » read more

Difficult Memory Choices In AI Systems
By Ann Mutschler - 12 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

The number of memory choices and architectures is exploding, driven by the rapid evolution in AI and machine learning chips being designed for a wide range of very different end markets and systems. Models for some of these systems can range in size from 10 billion to 100 billion parameters, and they can vary greatly from one chip or application to the next. Neural network training and infer... » read more

Growing Complexity Adds To Auto IC Safety Challenges
By Ann Mutschler - 05 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

The automotive industry is working to streamline, automate and tame verification of automotive electronic control units, SoCs and other chips used in vehicles, many of which are becoming so complex and intertwined that progress is getting bogged down. Modern cars may have up to 100 ECUs, which control such vehicle functions as engine, powertrain, transmission, brakes, suspension, entertainme... » read more

Speeding Up AI With Vector Instructions
By Ann Mutschler - 04 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

A search is underway across the industry to find the best way to speed up machine learning applications, and optimizing hardware for vector instructions is gaining traction as a key element in that effort. Vector instructions are a class of instructions that enable parallel processing of data sets. An entire array of integers or floating point numbers is processed in a single operation, elim... » read more

Using Verification Data More Effectively
By Ann Mutschler - 29 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Verification is producing so much data from complex designs that engineering teams need to decide what to keep, how long to keep it, and what they can learn from that data for future projects. Files range from hundreds of megabytes to hundreds of gigabytes, depending on the type of verification task, but the real value may not be obvious unless AI/machine learning algorithms are applied to a... » read more

Confusion Grows Over Packaging And Scaling
By Ann Mutschler - 15 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

The push toward both multi-chip packaging and continued scaling of digital logic is creating confusion about how to classify designs, what design tools work best, and how to best improve productivity and meet design objectives. While the goals of design teams remains the same — better performance, lower power, lower cost — the choices often involve tradeoffs between design budgets and ho... » read more

Sensor Fusion Challenges In Cars
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

The automotive industry is zeroing in on sensor fusion as the best option for dealing with the complexity and reliability needed for increasingly autonomous vehicles, setting the stage for yet another shift in how data from multiple devices is managed and utilized inside a vehicle. The move toward greater autonomy has proved significantly more complicated than anyone expected at first. There... » read more

System-Level Packaging Tradeoffs
By Ann Mutschler - 30 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Leading-edge applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, and 5G, all require high bandwidth, higher performance, lower power and lower latency. They also need to do this for the same or less money. The solution may be disaggregating the SoC onto multiple die in a package, bringing memory closer to processing elements and delivering faster turnaround time. But ... » read more

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