Author's Latest Posts


What Makes A Good AI Accelerator


The rapid growth and dynamic nature of AI and machine learning algorithms is sparking a rush to develop accelerators that can be optimized for different types of data. Where one general-purpose processor was considered sufficient in the past, there are now dozens vying for a slice of the market. As with any optimized system, architecting an accelerator — which is now the main processing en... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 23


Adapting machine learning for use in scientific research To better tailor machine learning for effective use in scientific research, the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a collaborative grant to a group of researchers, including UC Santa Barbara mathematician Paul Atzberger, to establish a new data science research center. According to UCSB, the Physics-Informed Learning Machines for M... » read more

The Building Blocks Of Future Compute


Eric Hennenhoefer, vice president of research at Arm, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about privacy, security, high-performance computing, accelerators, and Arm’s research. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Privacy, cybersecurity, silicon photonics, quantum computing are all hot topics today. What do you find really interesting with these emerging areas? ... » read more

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

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