Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The AI chip market is booming. Gartner expects revenue for the year will hit $53.4 billion, up 20.9% from 2022. The firm predicts that number will grow to $119 billion by 2027.  In the consumer electronics market, the value of AI-enabled application processors will amount to $1.2 billion in 2023, up from $558 million in 2022. Germany will spend nearly €1 billion (~US$1.7B) over the next t... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Intel aims to quadruple capacity for its most advanced chip packaging services by 2025, including with a new facility in Malaysia, per Nikkei Asia. Huawei is building a collection of secret semiconductor fabrication facilities across China to let the company skirt U.S. sanctions, SIA warned in a presentation seen by Bloomberg. It’s acquired at least two existing plants and is building at l... » read more

Predicting The Future For Semiconductors


Is it possible to predict the future? Of course not. We all make projections of what happened in the past, where they are now, and the implications for the future. We bias that in various ways and think we are making some astounding revelation, which is highly unlikely to become true. Of course, by luck, some people get it right and they are bestowed with grand accolades and awards. The likelih... » read more

Balancing IR Drop Unpredictability With Post-Silicon Flexibility


The concept of IR drop in silicon chips has always been a crucial aspect of chip design. However, recent technological trends and the emergence of new challenges, such as voltage-sensitive paths, have introduced a degree of uncertainty in predicting and effectively managing IR drop. These uncertainties are driving the need for a more flexible approach in mitigating on-die voltage droop. Increa... » read more

Design Complexity In The Golden Age Of Semiconductors


While writing last month's blog that used some of the trend charts we have seen, I noticed that a lot of the data ends in 2020 or earlier, but I was too close to the deadline to sit down and make orderly updates to some of the charts. Working day-to-day in the area of SoC integration and networks-on-chips (NoCs), the classic chart based on Karl Rupp's now 50 years of processor data that overlay... » read more

Generative AI: Transforming Inference At The Edge


The world is witnessing a revolutionary advancement in artificial intelligence with the emergence of generative AI. Generative AI generates text, images, or other media responding to prompts. We are in the early stages of this new technology; still, the depth and accuracy of its results are impressive, and its potential is mind-blowing. Generative AI uses transformers, a class of neural network... » read more

Wide Bandgap Semiconductors: What Modeling Challenges Must We Overcome


As power electronics shrink in size, the demands on power, frequency, and efficiency grow exponentially. The semiconductor industry is leaning heavily into wide bandgap materials like gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) to help meet these demands. Recent research projects that the global GaN semiconductor devices market will grow at a CAGR of 25.4% from 2023 to 2030. However, the ... » read more

Optimizing IC Designs For Real-World Use Cases


Semiconductor systems are becoming more focused on power, performance, and area for the primary scenarios they are likely to see in real-world applications, but increasingly at the expense of secondary tasks. This is happening at all levels of abstraction and all stages of the design flow. At the highest level, processors are being optimized to run a given set of software. RISC-V is one of t... » read more

RISC-V Customization Gets A Standing Ovation


Processor vendors have always tried to create a large software ecosystem around their products, because it creates stickiness and it naturally “locks-in” large numbers of customers who have invested in the creation of dedicated software. This effect is growing over time as the quantity of software is ever increasing per product: we could talk about more than 100 million lines of code in a c... » read more

AI, Rising Chip Complexity Complicate Prototyping


Prototyping, an essential technology for designing complex chips in tight market windows, is becoming significantly more challenging for the growing number of designs that include AI/ML. Prototyping remains one of the foundational pillars of the whole shift left movement, allowing software to be developed and tested before actual silicon is available. That, in turn, enables multiple teams t... » read more

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