Author's Latest Posts


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

System Bits: Aug. 29


Could video goggles, and a tiny implant cure blindness? Incredibly, the world of medical research is on the verge of curing blindness. Similar to cochlear implants for deaf people, Stanford University scientists and engineers are developing new devices to this end, including a bionic vision system based on photovoltaic implants, which is awaiting approval for human clinical trials in Europe. A... » read more

Tools To Design CNNs


Convolutional neural networks are becoming a mainstay in machine learning and artificial intelligence, allowing a network of distributed sensors to collect data and send them to a central brain for processing. This is a relatively simple idea in comparison to today's technology, and the idea of the [getkc id="261" kc_name="convolutional neural network"] has been around for some time. But bui... » read more

When Is Verification Complete?


Deciding when verification is done is becoming a much more difficult decision, prompting verification teams to increasingly rely on metrics rather than just the tests listed in the verification plan. This trend has been underway for the past couple of process nodes, but it takes time to spot trends and determine whether they are real or just aberrations. The Wilson Research Group conducts a ... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 22


Bioimaging technique tracks multiple in vivo interactions To make it possible to quickly and economically monitor multiple molecular interactions in a large area of living tissue – such as an organ or a small animal — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers have created an approach to optical imaging that could have applications in medical diagnosis, guided surgery, or pre-clinical dr... » read more

How Reliable Are FinFETs?


Stringent safety requirements in the automotive and industrial sectors are forcing chipmakers to re-examine a number of factors that can impact reliability over the lifespan of a device. Many of these concerns are not new. Electrical overstress (EOS), electrostatic discharge (ESD) and [getkc id="160" kc_name="electromigration"] (EM) are well understood, and have been addressed by EDA tools f... » read more

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