Author's Latest Posts


End-To-End Traceability


Despite standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508, there are still disconnects and gaps in the supply chain and design-through-manufacturing flows. Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, digs into what's missing, why changes made in one area are not reflected in other areas and throughout the product lifecycle, and why various different phases of the flow don't always match up ... » read more

1.6 Tb/s Ethernet Challenges


Moving data at blazing fast speeds sounds good in theory, but it raises a number of design challenges. John Swanson, senior product marketing manager for high-performance computing digital IP at Synopsys, talks about the impact of next-generation Ethernet on switches, the types of data that need to be considered, the causes of data growth, and the size and structure of data centers, both in the... » read more

Reviving The IPO Route For IP Companies


K. Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris IP, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the company's recent decision to go public, including the benefits and risks of operating as a public IP company. SE: The rule of thumb used to be $20 million in revenue was needed for an IP company to do an IPO at the turn of the Millennium, and then it increased to $40 million about a de... » read more

What’s Missing For Designing Chips At The System Level


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


An investigation by the Automobile Association of America found that lane-keeping assist and automatic emergency braking, both high-profile ADAS features, are prone to failure in rain. According to the report, 69% of tests conducted with simulated rainfall resulted in test vehicles crossing lane markers, and 33% of simulations resulted in collisions at 35 mph. Surprisingly, risk of accidents di... » read more

Total Critical Area For Optimizing Test Patterns


Increasing complexity at advanced nodes makes it much harder to locate defects and latent defects because there is more surface area to cover and much less space between the various components in a leading-edge chip design. Ron Press, technology enablement director at Siemens Digital Industries Software, talks about why it’s so important to predict where defects are most likely to occur in th... » read more

The Everything New Syndrome


Technology is all about the latest features, the fastest processing, with the lowest power. While that sounds great in marketing pitch, any or all of those factors don't necessarily equate to a better product or long-term user satisfaction. There's a reason semiconductor companies are conservative by nature. They want to know that when they spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a ... » read more

Growing Challenges With Wafer Bump Inspection


As advanced packaging goes mainstream, ensuring that wafer bumps are consistent has emerged as a critical concern for foundries and OSATs. John Hoffman, computer vision engineering manager at CyberOptics, talks about the shift toward middle-of-line and how that is affecting inspection and metrology, why there is so much concern over co-planarity and alignment, how variation can add up and creat... » read more

Don’t Toss That Gasoline Engine Just Yet


As auto makers race toward increasingly electrified vehicles, there is an entire after-market effort underway that was started decades ago, largely by hobbyists. And after decades of playing around with batteries and novel technologies, they've come to roughly the same conclusions as the owners of newer electric vehicles. There are definite advantages as well as some limitations, and the needle... » read more

Open Cavity Plastic Packaging


Rapid change in electronics is also causing rapid obsolescence. But in some markets, the systems are supposed to last for decades. Sam Sadri, senior process engineer at QP Technologies (formerly Quik-Pak), talks with Semiconductor Engineering about why it’s so important to use existing package footprints, what are the challenges in replacing the circuitry inside a package, and which markets a... » read more

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