category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Architecture, Materials And Software
By Ed Sperling - 12 Apr, 2018 - Comments: 0

AI, machine learning and autonomous vehicles will require massive improvements in performance, at the same power consumption level (or better), over today's chips. But it's obvious that the usual approach of shrinking features to improve power/performance isn't going to be sufficient. Scaling will certainly help, particularly on the logic side. More transistors are needed to process a huge i... » read more

Exponentials At The Edge
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2018 - Comments: 0

The age of portable communication has set off a scramble for devices that can achieve almost anything a desktop computer could handle even five years ago. But this is just the beginning. The big breakthrough with mobile devices was the ability to combine voice calls, text and eventually e-mail, providing the rudiments of a mobile office-all on a single charge of a battery that was light enou... » read more

Customizing Power And Performance
By Ed Sperling - 08 Feb, 2018 - Comments: 0

Designing chips is getting more difficult, and not just for the obvious technical reasons. The bigger issue revolves around what these chips going to be used for-and how will they be used, both by the end user and in the context of other electronics. This was a pretty simple decision when hardware was developed somewhat independently of software, such as in the PC era. Technology generally d... » read more

Warp Speed Ahead
By Ed Sperling - 11 Jan, 2018 - Comments: 3

The computing world is on a tear, but not just in one direction. While battery-powered applications are focused on extending the time between charges or battery replacements, there is a whole separate and growing market for massive improvements in speed. Ultimately, this is where quantum computing will play a role, probably sometime in the late 2020/early 2030 timeframe, according to multipl... » read more

Noise At 7nm And Beyond
By Ed Sperling - 14 Dec, 2017 - Comments: 0

The digital and analog worlds always have been very different. Digital engineers see the world in terms of electrons and a well-defined set of numerical values. Their waves are discrete and squared off and their devices are often noisy when they turn on and off. Analog engineers think in terms of quiet, smooth waves, and they are very concerned about anything that can disrupt those waves, such ... » read more

Quantum Madness
By Ed Sperling - 09 Nov, 2017 - Comments: 3

The race is on to commercialize quantum computing for everything from autonomous vehicles to supercomputers for hire. IBM has been working on a 50-qubit computer. Intel and QuTech, its Dutch research partner, showed off a 17-qubit test chip last month. And Alphabet, Google's parent company, is developing a 20-qubit computer. These numbers sound paltry compared to the billions of transistors ... » read more

New Materials For Computing
By Ed Sperling - 12 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

The U.S. Department of Energy rolled out a new program to develop materials for "extreme conditions" for high-performance computing, setting the stage for much more mobile versions of AI and machine learning. This effort, if successful, has interesting implications on a number of levels. For one, the DOE's mandate includes everything from energy security to weaponry, and high-performance com... » read more

What’s After 7nm?
By Ed Sperling - 14 Sep, 2017 - Comments: 1

The rollout of 10/7nm was a long time coming, and for good reason. It's hard stuff, and chipmakers have to be ready to take a giant step forward with new processes, tools, and to deal with a slew of physical effects that no longer can be handled by just guard-banding a design. The big question is what's next, when it will happen, and how much it will cost. Preparing for the next process node... » read more

Rethinking Computing Fundamentals
By Ed Sperling - 10 Aug, 2017 - Comments: 0

New compute architectures—not just new chips—are becoming a common theme in Silicon Valley these days. The whole semiconductor industry is racing to find the fastest, cheapest, lowest-power approach to processing. The drivers of this shift are well documented. Moore's Law is slowing down, in part because it's becoming more difficult to route signals across an SoC at the latest process no... » read more

Performance To The People
By Ed Sperling - 13 Jul, 2017 - Comments: 0

Ever since the IoT became a household term, the almost universal concept was that extremely low-power, simplistic devices would rule the edge. They would collect data, send it to the cloud, and the cloud would send back useful information. That's a great marketing concept for gateways and cloud services, but it's not scalable. Consumers don't just want to know when their heartbeat is irregul... » read more

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