Is There Still a Future for Hard Disk Drives?


The capacity for solid state drives (SSDs) keeps going up while the price per terabyte keeps falling, sometimes raising questions about the future for hard disk drives (HDDs). Will the cost of SSDs per TB eventually become so low that they will totally displace HDDs? I decided to ask a couple of experts in the field, Jim Handy from Objective Analysis and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. ... » read more

Advancing Outlier And Quality Control Methodologies


Traditional outlier and quality control methodologies often assume that data will conform to ideal, Gaussian distributions. In practice, this is rarely the case. Upstream variability in manufacturing—ranging from process variation to equipment inconsistencies—can significantly impact the behavior of otherwise good die. Identifying subtle yield detractors requires examining a broader set of ... » read more

Can Cheaper Lasers Handle Short Distances?


Optical technology is well established for long-haul communications, but the distances it serves are shrinking — especially in the data center. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) already drive short fiber links. But efforts are underway to further scale them down to provide more connections through waveguides than fiber can provide. “We have seen the transition from long... » read more

Challenges And Outlook of Photonic-Integrated Circuit Packaging (Hanyang Univ.)


A new technical paper titled "Advanced Optical Integration Processes for Photonic-Integrated Circuit Packaging" was published by researchers at Hanyang University. Excerpt "This review discusses the latest developments in photonic integrated chip packaging at the component, chip, and system levels. It also highlights the current issues and challenges of these technologies and provides futur... » read more

Overview Of The End-to-End Autonomous Driving through V2X Challenge (Tsinghua, HK Univ., Stanford, TU Munich et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Research Challenges and Progress in the End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving Competition" was published by researchers at Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University, Stanford University, TU Munich, Imperial College of London et al. Abstract "With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication has emerge... » read more

LLM Inference: Core Bottlenecks Imposed By Memory, Compute Capacity, Synchronization Overheads (NVIDIA)


A new technical paper titled "Efficient LLM Inference: Bandwidth, Compute, Synchronization, and Capacity are all you need" was published by NVIDIA. Abstract "This paper presents a limit study of transformer-based large language model (LLM) inference, focusing on the fundamental performance bottlenecks imposed by memory bandwidth, memory capacity, and synchronization overhead in distributed ... » read more

Statistical BER Analysis For Two Types Of Communication Systems In Chiplet Integration (TSMC)


An new technical paper titled "Fast and Accurate Jitter Modeling for Statistical BER Analysis for Chiplet Interconnect and Beyond" was published by researchers at TSMC. Abstract "In this paper, we investigate Statistical Bit Error Rate (BER) analysis for low-loss short-reach chiplet interface and high-loss long-reach serial interface. We used jitter filtering to account for the residue jitt... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government announced new import tariff actions and deals this week, including: The EU: 15% tariff on most goods including semiconductors. According to the EU's president, the action excludes semiconductor equipment. Copper: 50% tariff on all imports of semi-finished copper products and intensive copper derivative products, effective Aug. 1, but raw input material is excluded. ... » read more

Hallucination And Innovation At DAC


At DAC this year, I had the pleasure of moderating an intimate chat between Alon Shtepel, senior director for ASIC at Micron, and Abhi Kolpekwar, vice president and general manager for digital verification technology at Siemens EDA. The assigned topic was generative AI in design and verification, with the more provocative subtitle asking if we are hallucinating or innovating? L-R: Brian ... » read more

Baby, It’s Hot Outside!


Electronics manufacturing production sites are ideal places to be during the summer because they maintain controlled temperatures. It’s well known that 23°C (74°F) is the ideal temperature inside electronics manufacturing areas. However, when the outside temperature reaches 40°C (104°F), the air conditioning system may struggle to maintain this lower value indoors. Many companies estab... » read more

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