Service Revenue Growing With Chip Complexity


Rising complexity, new markets, and a shortage of in-house expertise are beginning to rekindle demand for services for the first time in nearly a decade. The semiconductor industry has been racing to design chips for a variety of new and existing applications, but they are facing challenges on a number of fronts: Leading-edge chips require new architectures due to a sharp reduction in s... » read more

Layered Security Offers Best Embedded Hardware Security


The importance of building a secure and rigid foundation in SoC and system designs has never been so true as it is now, given not only the garden variety of software vulnerabilities existing today, but also micro-architectural attacks on CPUs like Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow. Design engineers should embrace two security-related tenets when selecting a security processor: one is depth o... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers China has created a new $29 billion fund to help advance its semiconductor sector, according to reports from Bloomberg and others. Here's another report. The The U.S. and China are in the midst of a trade war. This has prompted China to accelerate its efforts to become more self-sufficient in semiconductor design and production. This includes DRAMs as well as logic/foundry. -----... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Micron acquired FWDNXT, an AI software and hardware startup. Founded in 2017 and based in Lafayette, Indiana, FWDNXT, specializes in building machine learning deep neural network inference accelerators scalable from edge devices to server-class performance as Xilinx FPGAs, SoCs, or SDK. The company's engine already powers Micron's Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) technology. “FWDNXT is an a... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


IoT/Edge Achronix teamed up with Bittware to develop a smart accelerator card based on a 7nm FPGA from Achronix. The card is targeted for edge devices, where pre-processing and acceleration of data movement is critical due to the enormous quantity of data being generated by sensors. The strategy is to move the processing closer to the data, rather than processing input from multiple sensors in... » read more

Which Verification Engine When


Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing at Cadence, talks about which tools get used throughout the design flow, from architecture to simulation, formal verification, emulation, prototyping all the way to production, how the cloud has impacted the direction of the flow, and how machine learning will impact verification. » read more

Accelerating Chiplets With 112G XSR SerDes PHYs


The fading of Moore’s Law and an almost exponential increase in data is challenging the semiconductor industry as never before. Indeed, zettabytes of data are constantly generated by a wide range of devices including IoT endpoints such as vehicles, wearables, smartphones and appliances. Moreover, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications are adding new ... » read more

Migrating 3D Into The Mainstream


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Business;... » read more

Tricky Tradeoffs For LPDDR5


LPDDR5 is slated as the next-gen memory for AI technology, autonomous driving, 5G networks, advanced displays, and leading-edge camera applications, and it is expected to compete with GDDR6 for these applications. But like all next-gen applications, balancing power, performance, and area concerns against new technology options is not straightforward. These are interesting times in the memory... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 30


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the future of the automotive industry, the options for making the transition to autonomous driving, and how experience with electric vehicles influences perception of them. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls digs into the challenges of testing memory in an embedded system. A Synopsys writer looks at doubling bandwidth in PCIe 5.0, the PHY logical changes a... » read more

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