Author's Latest Posts


System Bits: Oct. 16


Solving the quantum verification problem UC Berkeley doctoral candidate Urmila Mahadev spent 8 years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation, which is how to know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all, according to Quanta Magazine. In her paper, Mahadev presents the first protocol allowing a classical computer to interactively ... » read more

ML Becomes Useful For Variation Coverage


According to industry sources, it is quite a feat to get a chip back from the foundry that actually meets the specifications the design team worked towards, and because of this much effort is underway across the industry to understand what will happen to a design once it reaches the manufacturing stage, and what the effects of design choices actually are. AI and ML are absolutely the buzz wo... » read more

Power Issues Grow For Cloud Chips


Performance levels in traditional or hyperscale data centers are being limited by power and heat caused by an increasing number of processors, memory, disk and operating systems within servers. The problem is so complex and intertwined, though, that solving it requires a series of steps that hopefully add up to a significant reduction across a system. But at 7nm and below, predicting exactly... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 9


Sensing with light pulses In a development expected to be useful in applications including distance measurement, molecular fingerprinting and ultrafast sampling, EPFL researchers have found a way to implement an optical sensing system by using spatial multiplexing, a technique originally developed in optical-fiber communication, which produces three independent streams of ultrashort optical pu... » read more

Automotive Safety Requirements Impact Ecosystem


As activity by the automotive industry ramps to include sophisticated electronics for things like electrification and autonomous features, the changes that have already begun across the automotive supply chain in support of these are driving up complexity for semiconductor design teams on an exponential scale. For IP providers like ArterisIP, vice president of marketing, Kurt Shuler, said th... » read more

Adding Safety Into Automotive Design


The ISO 26262 spec is a household term for anyone even remotely involved with the automotive industry today. Increasingly, though, it is being used interchangeably with safety-readiness across the entire supply chain. ISO 26262 compliance is a prerequisite for IP and chips used in an increasing number of automotive applications. It applies to systems, software, and to individual products. An... » read more

Cloud Drives Changes In Network Chip Architectures


Cloud data centers have changed the networking topology and how data moves throughout a large data center, prompting significant changes in the architecture of the chips used to route that data and raising a whole new set of design challenges. Cloud computing has emerged as the fast growing segment of the data center market. In fact, it is expected to grow three-fold in the next few years, a... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 2


Computer algorithms exhibit prejudice based on datasets Researchers at Cardiff University and MIT have shown that groups of autonomous machines are capable of demonstrating prejudice by identifying, copying, and learning this behavior from one another. The team noted that while it may seem that prejudice is a human-specific phenomenon that requires human cognition to form an opinion of, or ... » read more

RISC-V Inches Toward The Center


RISC-V is pushing further into the mainstream, showing up across a wide swath of designs and garnering support from a long and still-growing list of chipmakers, tools vendors, universities and foundries. In most cases it is being used as a complementary processor than a replacement for something else, but that could change in the future. What makes RISC-V particularly attractive to chipmaker... » read more

Aging In Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss design reliability and circuit aging with João Geada, chief technologist for the semiconductor business unit at ANSYS; Hany Elhak, product management director, simulation and characterization in the custom IC and PCB group at Cadence; Christoph Sohrmann, advanced physical verification at Fraunhofer EAS; Magdy Abadir, vice president of marketing at ... » read more

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