Manufacturing Printed Sensors

By Ed Sperling - 15 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

Vijaya Kayastha, lead device development engineer at Brewer Sciences, talks about the different approaches for different printed sensors, why each of those requires different skill levels for scaling up the process, and why this technology will be so important for industrial and IoT applications. » read more

Speed Returns As The Key Metric

By Ed Sperling - 08 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

For the foreseeable future, it's all about performance. For the past decade or so, power and battery life have been the defining characteristics of chip design. Performance was second to those. This was particularly important in smart phones and wearable devices, where time between charges was a key selling point. In fact, power-hungry processors killed the first round of smart watches. But ... » read more

In-Memory Computing

By Ed Sperling - 08 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 1

Gideon Intrater, CTO at Adesto Technologies, talks about why in-memory computing is now being taken seriously again, years after it was first proposed as a possible option. What's changed is an explosion in data, and a recognition that it's too time- and energy-intensive to send all of that data back and forth between memories and processors on the same chip, let alone to the cloud and back. On... » read more

Process Window Optimization

By Ed Sperling - 07 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research, examines increasing process variation and interactions between various types of variation, why different approaches are necessary to improve yield and continue scaling. » read more

The Great Test Blur

By Ed Sperling - 06 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

As chip design and manufacturing shift left and right, concerns over reliability are suddenly front and center. But figuring out what exactly what causes a chip to malfunction, or at least not meet specs for performance and power, is getting much more difficult. There are several converging trends here, each of which plays an integral role in improving reliability. But how significant a role... » read more

More Semiconductor Data Moving To Cloud

By Ed Sperling - 06 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

The cloud is booming. After years of steady growth it has begun to spike, creating new options for design, test, analytics and AI, all of which have an impact on every segment of the semiconductor industry. The initial idea behind the cloud is that it would supplement processing done on premises, adding extra processing power wherever necessary, such as in the verification and debug stages o... » read more

Using Better Data To Shorten Test Time

By Ed Sperling - 06 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 1

The combination of machine learning plus more sensors embedded into IC manufacturing equipment is creating new possibilities for more targeted testing and faster throughput for fabs and OSATs. The goal is to improve quality and reduce the cost of manufacturing complex chips, where time spent in manufacturing is ballooning at the most advanced nodes. As the number of transistors on a die incr... » read more

Smart NiCs

By Ed Sperling - 05 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 1

Manish Sinha, strategic planning for marketing and business at Achronix, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changing in networking interface cards, how to get more performance out of these devices, and how much needs to be in hardware versus software. » read more

Who’s In Your Wallet?

By Ed Sperling - 01 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

Hacking a financial institution is a very big deal. Banks and credit card companies take their security very seriously because they literally have money to lose if something goes awry. What becomes clear, though, in reading the criminal complaint involving the Capital One hack, is that the weakest link isn't always the hardware or the software. It's the geeks who want to show off, or ... » read more

Solving 5G’s Thorniest Issues

By Ed Sperling - 01 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

5G rollouts are beginning to hit the market, accompanied by a long list of unsolved technical and business issues surrounding this next-generation wireless technology. But progress is being made on some of the key challenges facing this technology, even though not all of those solutions will be in place at launch. The real challenges are with millimeter-wave implementations of 5G, which oper... » read more

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