Author's Latest Posts


New Uses For Manufacturing Data


The semiconductor industry is becoming more reliant on data analytics to ensure that a chip will work as expected over its projected lifetime, but that data is frequently inconsistent or incomplete, and some of the most useful data is being hoarded by companies for competitive reasons. The volume of data is rising at each new process node, where there are simply more things to keep track of,... » read more

An Inside Look At Testing’s Leading Edge


Mike Slessor, president and CEO of FormFactor, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss testing of AI and 5G chips, and why getting power into a chip for testing is becoming more difficult at each new node. SE: How does test change with AI chips, where you've got massive numbers of accelerators and processors developed at 7 and 5nm? Slessor: A lot of the AI stuff that we've been... » read more

Big Changes For eFPGAs


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the state of embedded FPGAs, why this is easier for some companies than others, why this is important for adding flexibility into an ASIC, and what are the main applications for this technology. » read more

Which Chip Interconnect Protocol Is Better?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to the discuss the pros and cons of the Compute Express Link (CXL) and the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) with Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP; Richard Solomon, technical marketing manager for PCI Express controller IP at Synopsys; and Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation... » read more

The Great Auto Race Goes Internal


Carmakers have discovered a new competitive threat, and it's coming from within their own supply chain. In the past, OEMs leveraged their suppliers to compete against other OEMs, often tapping the same Tier 1 players as their competitors because there was enough differentiation in acceleration time, braking distance, cabin amenities and price to create distinctive brands. Porsche is known fo... » read more

Who Owns A Car’s Chip Architecture


Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, examines the competitive battle brewing between OEMs and Tier 1s over who owns the architecture of the electronic systems and the underlying chip hardware. This has become a growing point of contention as both struggle for differentiation in a market where increasingly autonomous vehicles will all behave the same way. That, in turn, has si... » read more

Key Drivers In New Chip Industry Outlook


How well the semiconductor industry fares over the next 12 to 24 months depends upon the evolution of a virus. That alone will determine the correct model for an economic rebound — V, U, extended U, or maybe even a double U. But what's also becoming clear is those models don't apply uniformly to all sectors or sub-sectors of the semiconductor industry. Looked at as a whole, the entire indu... » read more

A Node Too Far?


Physics is an unforgiving master. While the semiconductor industry has been actively developing new transistor structures, new materials for interconnects and lining trenches, and new approaches to alleviate congestion at the lowest metal levels, it also has been playing an accelerating game of Whac-a-Mole. Whenever a problem pops up, the solution to that problem is never complete and more prob... » read more

Using Big Data For Yield And Reliability


John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB, talks about the importance of clean data for traceability, yield improvement and device reliability, where and how it gets cleaned, and why that needs to be accompanied by domain expertise. » read more

DDR PHY Training


Brett Murdock, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, explains how to train the DRAM physical layer using firmware, why that is so important for flexibility, and what kinds of issues engineers encounter when using this approach. » read more

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