Getting Granular On The Edge


Imagine a plane flying at 30,000 feet. Two things are visible—clouds and land. In the processing world, that land mass is the edge, and as the plane begins to descend the edge begins to take on a more distinct shape and different features begin to appear. From the air, everyone can see just how large this market opportunity is. What they can't make out are the winning models for success. B... » read more

Autonomous Vehicles Are Reshaping The Tech World


The effort to build cars that can drive themselves is reshaping the automotive industry and its supply chain, impacting everything from who defines safety to how to ensure quality and reliability. Automakers, which hardly knew the names of their silicon suppliers a couple of years ago, are now banding together in small groups to share the costs and solve technical challenges that are well be... » read more

Advantages Of LPDDR5: A New Clocking Scheme


Earlier this year, JEDEC released the new standard, JESD209–5, Low Power Double Data Rate 5 (LPDDR5). Those that contributed to the development of the standard come from a diverse technology background and represent both manufacturers and consumers of SDRAM memories. Now we have a new memory standard to help enable the future that requires more compute power, higher reliability, and lower pow... » read more

Machine Learning For Autonomous Drive


Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is arguably the biggest technical innovation of the last decade. Although the algorithms for AI have been in existence for many years, the recent explosion of both data as well as faster compute made it possible to apply those algorithms to solve many real life use cases. One of the most prominent of these use cases is fully aut... » read more

Securing IoT Devices With A Programmable Root Of Trust


The exponential increase of vulnerable IoT devices demands a far more determined and proactive approach to security than is offered by the current industry status quo. This is because compromised IoT devices pose a threat to both consumers and critical internet infrastructure. For example, a compromised security camera or baby video monitor can be easily exploited to violate consumer privacy... » read more

The Race For Better Computational Software


Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about computational software, why it's so critical at the edge and in AI systems, and where the big changes are across the semiconductor industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: There is no consistent approach to how data will be processed at the edge, in part because there is no consis... » read more

IP Security In FPGAs


Quinn Jacobson, strategic architect at Achronix, talks about security in FPGAs, including how to prevent reverse engineering of IP, how to make sure the design is authentic, and how to limit access to IP in transit and in the chip. » read more

eFPGA Macros Deliver Higher Speeds from Less Area/Resources


We work with a lot of customers designing eFPGA into their SoCs.  Most of them have “random logic” RTL, but some customers have large numbers of complex, frequently used blocks. We have found in many cases that we can help the customer achieve higher throughput AND use less silicon area with Soft Macros. Let’s look at an example: 64x64 Multiply-Accumulate (MAC), below: If yo... » read more

Challenges To Building Level 5 Automotive Chips


It’s an exciting time in the automotive space, and this is especially true when it comes to all of the activity around autonomous driving and the path to achieving full Level 5 autonomy. The technology is complex, the ecosystem seems to get more complex by the day, and simulating autonomous systems safely makes this an extremely fascinating area from an engineering perspective. At the heart o... » read more

Re-Architecting SoCs For The AI Era


The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) demands that semiconductor companies re-architect their system on chip (SoC) designs to provide more scalable levels of performance, flexibility, efficiency, and integration. From the edge to data centers, AI applications require a rethink of memory structures, the numbers and types of heterogeneous processors and hardware accelerators, and careful con... » read more

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