Author's Latest Posts


Plugging Gaps In Advanced Packaging


The growing difficulty of cramming more features into an SoC is driving the entire chip industry to consider new packaging options, whether that is a more complex, integrated SoC or some type of advanced packaging that includes multiple chips. Most of the work done in this area so far has been highly customized. But as advanced packaging heads into the mainstream, gaps are beginning to appea... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 26


Spectroscopic science camera While the latest versions of most smartphones contain at least two and sometimes three built-in cameras, researchers at the University of Illinois would like to convince mobile device manufactures to add yet another image sensor as a built-in capability for health diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and general-purpose color sensing applications.   This comes... » read more

Managing Peak Power


Peak power is becoming a serious design constraint across chips and entire electronic systems as more functionality is added into end devices and the compute and switching infrastructure needed to support them. The issues are a direct result of growing complexity in designs, fixed or shrinking power budgets, and the need to process more data more quickly. In mobile devices, the addition of m... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 19


Novel quantum computing architecture invented University of New South Wales researchers have invented what they say is a radical new architecture for quantum computing, based on ‘flip-flop qubits,’ that promises to make the large-scale manufacture of quantum chips dramatically easier. [caption id="attachment_319384" align="alignnone" width="300"] Artist's impression of flip-flop qubit e... » read more

DARPA CHIPS Program Pushes For Chiplets


While the semiconductor industry plugs away at More Than Moore innovation, the U.S. government is guiding its own SoC development. A new program kicked off last year called ‘Common Heterogeneous Integration and IP Reuse Strategies’ or CHIPS to take its own approach the incredibly high cost of SoC design and manufacturing. DARPA said it recognizes that the explosive growth in mobile and t... » read more

Frenzy At 10/7nm


The number of chipmakers rushing to 10/7nm is rising, despite a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increased difficulty and cost of developing chips at the most advanced nodes. How long this trend continues remains to be seen. It's likely that 7/5nm will require new manufacturing equipment, tools, materials and transistor structures. Beyond that, there is no industry-accepted roadmap, m... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 12


Neural network cautionary tale As machine learning and neural networks proliferate widely today, there is a need to exercise caution in how they are employed, according to Stanford University researchers Michal Kosinki and Yilun Wang. In a study conducted recently, they have shown that deep neural networks can be used to determine the sexual orientation of a person, and caution that this ma... » read more

How To Make Autonomous Vehicles Reliable


The number of unknowns in automotive chips, subsystems and entire vehicles is growing as higher levels of driver assistance are deployed, sparking new concerns and approaches about how to improve reliability of these systems. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) will need to detect objects, animals and people, and they will be used for parking assistance, night vision and collision avoi... » read more

ADAS Vehicles Will Hit Roads Soon. Should They?


Adding fuel to the flurry of activity surrounding autonomous vehicles, yesterday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to approve Bill 3388: ‘To amend title 49, United States Code, regarding the authority of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over highly automated vehicles, to provide safety measures for such vehicles, and for other purposes.’ The... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 5


Reducing power consumption of datacenter caches As is commonly understood, most websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) reminded. They noted that a data ce... » read more

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