Options Widen For Optimizing IoT Designs


Creating a successful IoT design requires a deep understanding of the use cases, and a long list of tradeoffs among various components and technologies to provide the best solution at the right price point. Maximizing features and functions while minimizing costs is an ongoing balancing act, and the number of choices can be overwhelming. The menu includes SoC selection, OS and software proto... » read more

Squeezing The Margins


Back in 2016, we looked at the MediaTek Helio X20, the first Tri-Gear mobile SoC. Tri-Gear is a step beyond ARM’s big.LITTLE concept of using two different cores that have unique power and performance characteristics, by adding a third core. The main advantage to this approach is having more core choices to best run workloads at better energy efficiency and performance operating points. At... » read more

Blog Review: March 29


Siemens' Heather George suggests adopting a shift-left strategy for complex designs that integrate multiple dies into a package and examines the challenges and opportunities for performing comprehensive tests on 2.5D and 3D IC designs. Synopsys' Shekhar Kapoor notes that when considering whether a system will perform as intended, techniques that work well for monolithic SoCs may not be as we... » read more

Research Bits: March 28


Modeling how the nose smells The first 3D molecular-level picture of how an odor molecule binds to and activates an odorant receptor (OR) on olfactory cells in the nose may help us understanding and eventually be used to build a map of all the receptors. Scientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which UCSF developed, to take a moving picture of the wiggly r... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Mar. 28


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=89 /] If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a good fit for our global audience. At a minimum, papers need to be well researched and documented, relevant to the semiconductor ecosystem, and free of marketing bias. There is no cost involved for us p... » read more

Trusted Sensor Technology For The Internet Of Things


“Data is the new oil” — Clive Humby, 2006 While this prediction relates to the value that can be generated from data, the focus here is on the tools at the oil well. Just as oil drilling platforms are expected to reliably produce crude oil around the clock, sensors are expected to reliably and continuously deliver high-quality data. But sensors have long since evolved from simple me... » read more

AI Becoming More Prominent In Chip Design


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the role of AI in managing data and improving designs, and its growing role in pathfinding and preventing silent data corruption, with Michael Jackson, corporate vice president for R&D at Cadence; Joel Sumner, vice president of semiconductor and electronics engineering at National Instruments; Grace Yu, product and engineering manager at Meta... » read more

Hardware Based Monitoring For Zero Trust Environments


A technical paper titled "Towards Hardware-Based Application Fingerprinting with Microarchitectural Signals for Zero Trust Environments" was published by the Air Force Institute of Technology. Abstract "The interactions between software and hardware are increasingly important to computer system security. This research collects sequences of microprocessor control signals to develop machine ... » read more

Interconnects: Exploring Semi-Metals (Penn State, IBM, Rice University)


A technical paper titled "Exploring Topological Semi-Metals for Interconnects" was published by researchers at Penn State, IBM, and Rice University, with funding by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). Abstract "The size of transistors has drastically reduced over the years. Interconnects have likewise also been scaled down. Today, conventional copper (Cu)-based interconnects face a ... » read more

Logic Locking at the RTL, Leveraging The Behavioral State Transition Coding For Obfuscation (University of Florida)


A new technical paper titled "ReTrustFSM: Toward RTL Hardware Obfuscation-A Hybrid FSM Approach" was published by researchers at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Abstract: "Hardware obfuscating is a proactive design-for-trust technique against IC supply chain threats, i.e., IP piracy and overproduction. Many studies have evaluated numerous techniques for obfuscation purposes. Neverth... » read more

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