Author's Latest Posts


CHIPS For America’s National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) Program


At this year’s Design Automation Conference, Jay Lewis, director of CHIPS for America National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) Program, gave a presentation on the status and direction of the Center, its priorities for this year and how the NSTC can change the long-term trajectory for innovation. Fig. 1: Dr. Jay Lewis, director of NSTC Program, CHIPS R&D Office at the Dept. o... » read more

Margin Sensors In The Wild


Back in March, I wrote up an article here that looked at how a proxy circuit could be used to measure variations in circuit performance as conditions changed in the operating environment. There were a couple of recent presentations on margin sensors at two of the big EDA vendors' customer engineering forums that we’ll look at as well as another product with an upcoming presentation at DAC. Ma... » read more

TSMC Uncorks A16 With Super Power Rail


TSMC showed off its forthcoming A16 process technology node, targeted for the second half of 2026, at its 30th North American Technology Symposium this week. As the foundry moves from nanometer to angstrom process numbering, the new nodes will be prefixed with an “A” designation (instead of “N”) and A16 is the first for TSMC. TSMC said that N2 is still tracking to a 2025 production s... » read more

Staying Within The Margins


Last March I wrote an article called Squeezing the Margins that’s about a design that used an adaptive clocking scheme to keep the performance of a system high while simultaneously keeping the temperature below a specified maximum. Last August we looked at Managing Voltage Variation and how an adaptive clocking scheme could be used to manage dynamic voltage drop to maximize system performance... » read more

Brain-Inspired, Silicon Optimized


The 2024 International Solid State Circuits Conference was held this week in San Francisco. Submissions were up 40% and contributed to the quality of the papers accepted and the presentations given at the conference. The mood about the future of semiconductor technology was decidedly upbeat with predictions of a $1 trillion industry by 2030 and many expecting that the soaring demand for AI e... » read more

TSMC Reports 4Q2023 Earnings: N2 Still On Track For 2025 Production


TSMC reported their 4th quarter and end of year financial numbers for 2023. Year over year, net revenue was down 4.5% to NT$2,161.74 billion, but quarter over quarter revenue was essentially flat at NT$625.52 billion, so it appears that as 3nm is ramping up that revenue is improving. For the fourth quarter, 3nm contributed 15% of TSMC’s total wafer revenue, up from 6% in the third quarter ... » read more

Top500: Frontier Still On Top, Sunway Formally Reappears


New versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists have been released, and Frontier continues its reign at Number. 1. But a newcomer, Aurora, using Intel’s Sapphire Rapids, has entered at the Number 2 position with a “half-scale” system. Both machines are HPE Crays, with the former using AMD optimized third-gen EPYC 64C at 2.0GHz and AMD Instinct MI250X, while the latter uses Intel Xeon CPU... » read more

Artificial Intelligence Wonderland


Silicon Catalyst held its Sixth Annual Semiconductor Forum in Menlo Park on the SRI campus on November 9th. Richard Curtin, Managing Partner for Si Catalyst, opened the event with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" and noted how remarkable it was that a novel written back in 1968 was able to foretell the direction of the computer industry over 50 years into the future. ... » read more

Leaps in Quantum Computing


There are new computers that are generating some amazing results for solving problems in record time.  You won’t see these computers on the classic Top500 lists though, because they aren’t approaching computing in the same way. Using quantum computing algorithms like Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers, quantum computing holds the promise of solving problems that take exponentia... » read more

IBM’s Energy-Efficient NorthPole AI Unit


At this point it is well known that from an energy efficiency standpoint, the biggest bang for the back is to be found at the highest levels of abstraction. Fitting the right architecture to the task at hand i.e., an application specific architecture, will lead to benefits that are hard or impossible to claw back later in the design and implementation flow.  With the huge increase in the inter... » read more

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