SEMI 2026 U.S. Policy Strategy

By SEMI - 19 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry continues to serve as the foundation of U.S. technological innovation and economic growth, and it has entered its most decisive phase yet. As geopolitical competition intensifies and policy frameworks evolve, 2026 will push the United States to sustain its leadership in semiconductor design, manufacturing, and innovation amid growing alliances and accelerating competi... » read more

Why Indium Oxide Chips Are Getting So Much Attention

By Katherine Derbyshire - 19 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways Their low leakage is of interest for memory applications, particularly capacitor-less gain cell designs; They can be deposited over large areas using low-temperature processes, a very desirable characteristic for BEOL integration, and The variety of compositions available gives designers many options to achieve the specific properties they need. Indium tin oxide (ITO), ... » read more

When Cleaning Chips Isn’t Clean Enough

By Gregory Haley - 19 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways Contamination is becoming much more difficult to identify at the most advanced nodes, forcing fabs to rethink how control is achieved. Issues may show up as electrical or statistical anomalies, not particles, and not at time zero. Reliable classification is needed to identify critical contamination and reduce time and effort spent on nuisance failures. For much... » read more

Enabling the Industry’s First GPU-Accelerated Manufacturing Platform

By Synopsys - 19 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Discover how modern chip designs are revolutionizing the lithographic process, driving the need for innovative solutions to meet the industry's demand for shorter design cycles. This whitepaper explores the significant role of GPUs in accelerating computational lithography, offering unprecedented speed-ups for EDA tools in chip development. Learn about the collaborative efforts of Synopsys, NVI... » read more

Wi-Fi 7 Moves To The IoT

By Ed Sperling - 18 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Wi-Fi 7 has been a staple in high-end applications such as notebook computers and AR/VR glasses for the past couple years, where high-speed connectivity and low latency are essential. Known alternatively as IEEE 802.11be, and Extremely High Throughput Wi-Fi, it is starting to migrate downstream into IoT devices such as smart door locks, thermostats, and robotic vacuum cleaners. But the reason i... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 18

By Jesse Allen - 18 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Synopsys' Raja Tabet anticipates deployment of an agentic AI workforce within the next 12 to 24 months that can take on different engineering personas, such as a digital implementation agent, a verification agent, or an analog agent, to run experiments in parallel, generate and triage tests, and propose fixes. Cadence's Reela Samuel dives into power usage effectiveness in data centers and wh... » read more

Router-in-a-Package Design Combining HBM4, Chiplets and In-Package Optics (Technion, Berkeley, UCSD)

By Technical Paper Link - 18 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

A new technical paper "Scaling Routers with In-Package Optics and High-Bandwidth Memories" was posted by researchers at Technion, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. Abstract "This paper aims to apply two major scaling transformations from the computing packaging industry to internet routers: the heterogeneous integration of high-bandwidth memories (HBMs) and chiplets, as well as in-package optic... » read more

Detecting Architectural Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source RISC-V CPUs (CISPA)

By Technical Paper Link - 17 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

The paper "RISCover: Automatic Discovery of User-exploitable Architectural Security Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source RISC-V CPUs" was published by researchers at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. Abstract "The open and extensible RISC-V instruction set has enabled many new CPU vendors and implementations, but most commercial CPUs are closed-source, significantly hindering vul... » read more

Research Bits: Feb. 17

By Jesse Allen - 17 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Analog layout foundation model Researchers from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) built a foundation model for automated analog circuit layout. The team used a self-supervised learning approach, in which the model learns without human-provided labels. To counter a lack of available training data, the team divided analog layouts into small patches, masked part of each lay... » read more

Can A Computer Science Student Be Taught To Design Hardware?

By Liz Allan - 17 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 2

Key Takeaways New approaches are being devised and tested to address the talent shortage. Leveraging AI in design tools will help engineers become more efficient, and potentially could reduce the time it takes to train engineering students. EDA companies are looking at whether it's possible to train computer science and software engineers to become hardware engineers. A vari... » read more

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