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Balancing Workloads In AI Processor Designs


A growing number of AI processors are being designed around specific workloads rather than standardized benchmarks, optimizing performance and power efficiency, but often with enough flexibility to adapt to future changes. While the fundamentals of matrix multiplication and software optimization still apply, those alone are no longer sufficient. Designs need to address specific data types, w... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management Gains Traction, But It’s Complicated


Silicon lifecycle management (SLM) is gaining ground in semiconductor design and test by leveraging specialized on-die sensors and analytics engines to improve power, performance, yield, and reliability. Most modern SoCs mitigate the guesswork by leveraging DFT, which includes adding memory built-in self-test (BiST) or improving functional coverage, but these tests were meant for verifying c... » read more

Physical Access Control Raises New Security Concerns


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including fundamental security of GenAI, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Siemens EDA; Mohit... » read more

Reliable Training Data Paramount To AI Model Success


AI systems are increasingly being integrated into safety- and mission-critical applications ranging from automotive to health care and industrial IoT, stepping up the need for training data that is reliable, secure, and which is generated from trusted sources. AI activity is growing exponentially, as everybody tries to figure out how to apply it to their domain, application, or workload. In ... » read more

SDVs And AI Forcing Big Changes In Automotive


The automotive industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation that includes everything from software-defined vehicles, the injection of AI into nearly every facet of the design and use case of a vehicle, and a complete overhaul of traditional relationships between different tiers and OEMs. The switch to software-defined vehicles is a top priority for the automotive ecosystem. It enables... » read more

Security Tradeoffs: A Difficult Balance


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including new threat models from AI-based attacks, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Sieme... » read more

Often Overlooked, PHYs Are Essential To High-Speed Data Movement


Over the past couple of decades, the semiconductor industry has evolved from a supporting role for traditional verticals like mobile, automotive, and PCs to a foundational role in those markets, as well as in AI factories and hyperscale data centers. Underlying this transformation is the physical layer (PHY), which has emerged as a critical enabler for data transfer and communications. The P... » read more

AI: A New Tool For Hackers, And For Preventing Attacks


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including new threat models from AI-based attacks, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Siemens EDA; Mohit Arora, seni... » read more

Security Vulnerabilities Difficult To Detect In Verification Flow


As designs grow in complexity and size, the landscape for potential hackers to infiltrate a chip at any point in either the design or verification flow increases commensurately. Long considered to be a “safe” aspect of the design process, verification now must be a focus of chip developers from a security perspective. This also means the concept of trust has never been higher, and the tr... » read more

Multi-Die Assemblies Complicate Parasitic Extraction


The shift from planar designs to multi-die assemblies with complex interconnects is transforming what had become almost an afterthought in the design process into a first-order challenge. Parasitics include things like inductance, capacitance, and resistance, which have become more problematic at advanced nodes due to increasing logic density, thinner interconnects and insulators, and a spik... » read more

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