Reliability On The Rise In IC Design


Reliability has been an important factor in the semiconductor industry for decades. A closer look reveals three main priorities: In the area of technology development and optimization, the microscopic mechanisms that lead to degradation must be identified and understood before they can be fixed. Microanalytical methods are used here as well as TCAD simulations. If it’s not possible to... » read more

Virtual Development Of Perception Sensor Systems


By Ron Martin and Christoph Sohrmann Over the past few years, there has been a marked expansion in research and development activities related to driver assistance systems as well as highly automated and connected driving systems. However, this has yet to translate into a higher degree of automation in the average production vehicle – especially for SAE Level 3 and above. The next step in ... » read more

Analog IP Reuse


Analog integrated circuit IP is essential to how microelectronic circuits and systems interact with the environment. It enables things like signal conversion, stable power supply, and communication in state-of-the-art devices. However, designing these critical components – even though they are often a small part of complex chips – is very costly and risk-prone. And in today’s analog field... » read more

Fast Time-To-Digital Converters As Ultra-Precise Stopwatches For Quantum Technologies


Quantum technologies enable versatile novel applications in modern engineering topics such as information processing, communication or sensing. In particular, photonic quantum technologies are an innovative field of development which, based on the quantization of light, implements a qubit for example in the polarization or phase of a single photon, or in other degrees of freedom of the electrom... » read more

Circuit Design For Industry 4.0


By Björn Zeugmann and Olaf Enge-Rosenblatt The digitalization of industry is progressing in leaps and bounds, albeit not at the same speed everywhere. In many industries, processes can be digitalized well to very well — for example, because electronic control systems can be retrofitted from analog to digital relatively easily. In some cases, new industries emerge only because processes ha... » read more

Chiplets: More Standards Needed


Recent months have seen new advances in chiplet standardization. For example, consortia such as Bunch of Wires (BoW) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) have made progress in developing standards for die-to-die (D2D) interfaces in a chiplet’s design. Far from being a new phenomenon in communication, these types of standards are established for all forms of wired and wireless com... » 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

Edge AI And Chiplets


In the near future, more edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions will find their way into our lives. This will be especially true in the private sector for applications in the field of voice input and analysis of camera data, which will become well-established. These application areas require powerful AI hardware to be able to process the corresponding continuously accumulating data volumes... » read more

Predictive Health Monitoring In Functional Safety


Functional safety first became a major issue for the semiconductor industry in 2011 with the introduction of the ISO 26262 standard for implementing functional safety in the automotive industry. Before that, functional safety had already been standardized in a general manner for all industries since the end of the 1990s in IEC 61508. However, in the field of industrial automation, where the IEC... » read more

Microelectronics For Quantum Technologies


By Kay-Uwe Giering and Andy Heinig The transition of the quantum mechanics realm into engineering applications is opening up a large number of disruptive quantum technological opportunities. Their success relies on the recent technological advancements, which enable the controlled creation of individual quantum mechanical systems as well as their direct manipulation and measurement. Quantum ... » read more

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