Blog Review: Apr. 25

Mentor’s Cristian Filip digs into SerDes design with a focus on the adoption and evolution of Channel Operating Margin (COM) as a tool for ensuring compliance of high-speed designs and why it’s useful even if its mathematical procedure might be intimidating at the beginning.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan explains the importance of IBIS and AMI standards for SerDes design and why the upcoming DDR5 standard means a lot more people will need to know what they do.

Synopsys’ Robert Vamosi points to a casino hack straight out of a heist film as a cautionary tale of how innocuous devices, if hooked up to the internet, can cause big problems for data security.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff questions whether the hype surrounding blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies has gotten to the point of absurdity and argues that more blockchain-based solutions need to actually solve problems rather than being tacked on as a buzzword.

Arm’s Thomas Van Der Staaij presents ten arguments for why companies should consider creating custom chips and SoCs for IoT products, from the availability of a support ecosystem to protection against copycats.

Coventor’s Yu De Chen, Jacky Huang, Dalong Zhao, Jiangjiang (Jimmy) Gu, and Joseph Ervin dig into the importance of design technology co-optimization for semiconductor manufacturing and explain how to incorporate 3D structure optimization and electrical analysis to improve yield and timelines.

SEMI’s Amy Ly rounds up five recommended podcasts for anyone interested in MEMS and sensors, including a general introduction to the topic, piezoelectric microphones, and the new materials replacing silicon in MEMS manufacturing.

NI’s Jeff Phillips argues that the new wave of automotive testing can learn much from similar challenges in adjacent industries.

Samsung’s Anders Graham contends that flash memory will soon take over a large portion of data centers’ workload, relegating HDDs to housing data that very rarely needs to be accessed

Plus, check out the blogs featured in last week’s Manufacturing & Process Technology newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling contends that the merger of the ESD Alliance with SEMI has much deeper implications for the chip industry.

Executive Editor Mark LaPedus looks at the impact of new rare earths discoveries.

Applied Materials’ Sundeep Bajikar digs into the wireless technology that will underpin the next big advances.

The eBeam Initiative’s Jan Willis shows off a collection of videos on masks, models, and alternative lithography.

SEMI’s Ajit Manocha explains why combining associations provides a boost to the chip industry’s supply chain.

ClioSoft’s Ranjit Adhikary details the growing challenges of cataloging IP and its various avatars within a company.

GlobalFoundries’ Mark Granger takes a look at the technologies and resources required for assisted and autonomous vehicles.