Author's Latest Posts


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

Process Corner Explosion


The number of corners that need to be checked is exploding at 7nm and below, fueled by everything from temperature and voltage to changes in metal. Lowering risk and increasing predictability of an SoC at those nodes starts with understanding what will happen when a design is manufactured on a particular foundry process, captured in process corners. This is basically a way of modeling what i... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 11


Researchers ‘teleport’ a quantum gate In a key architectural step for building modular quantum computers, Yale University researchers have demonstrated the teleportation of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand. [caption id="attachment_24137942" align="alignleft" width="300"] A network overview of the modular quantum architecture demonstrated in the new study.Source: Yale Universit... » read more

Getting To Automotive Grade


Given the amount of activity surrounding automotive semiconductor design today design teams want to know how to approach designs for a market they may not yet be intimately familiar with. EDA vendors are very quickly ramping tools and services to help them get there. One of these is Mentor, A Siemens Business, which has actually been working in this market segment for two decades. Andrew ... » read more

Cracking The Auto IC Market


The market for automotive electronics is booming, and it has set off a global scramble among established chipmakers and startups. What's becoming clear, though, is that not everyone understands just how different automotive is from the mobile market. Mobile is still the highest-volume market for semiconductors, but the growth has flattened. In contrast, the value of the automotive electronic... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 4


Quantum material is both conductor, insulator University of Michigan researchers reminded that quantum materials are a type of odd substance that could be many times more efficient at conducting electricity through a mobile device like an iPhone than the commonly used conductor silicon if physicists could figure out how they work. Now, a University of Michigan physicist has taken a step clo... » read more

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