Research Bits: December 5


Neuromorphic nanowires Researchers from UCLA and University of Sydney built an experimental computing system physically modeled after the biological brain. The device is composed of a tangled-up network of wires containing silver and selenium that were allowed to self-organize into a network of entangled nanowires on top of an array of 16 electrodes. The nanowire network physically reconfigure... » read more

Research Bits: Nov. 28


Switchable photodetector and neuromorphic vision sensor Researchers from the Institute of Metal Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences built a device that can be switched between being a photodetector and neuromorphic vision sensor by adjusting the operating voltage. The trench-bridged GaN/Ga2O3/GaN heterojunction array device exhibits volatile and non-volatile photocurrents at low and hi... » read more

Research Bits: November 21


MoS2 in-memory processor Researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a large-scale in-memory processor using the 2D semiconductor material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), for the channel material in the more than 1,000 transistors that comprise the processor. The MoS2-based in-memory processor is dedicated to vector-matrix multiplication, key for digital signal ... » read more

Research Bits: November 14


Solid-state thermal transistor for heat management Researchers from University of California Los Angeles created a stable and fully solid-state thermal transistor that uses an electric field to control a semiconductor device’s heat movement. It is compatible with integrated circuits in semiconductor manufacturing processes. The team’s design incorporates the field effect on charge dynamics... » read more

Is Your Voltage Drop Flow Obsolete?


Voltage drop at advanced nodes is a deadly serious problem that has become unmanageable with the methodologies used by most chip designers today. This article will cover the reasons why power integrity has risen to a top-of-mind concern and why it has become almost impossible for today’s EDA tools to measure and fix it. We will then look at some radical methodology rethinking that is needed t... » read more

Flipping Processor Design On Its Head


AI is changing processor design in fundamental ways, combining customized processing elements for specific AI workloads with more traditional processors for other tasks. But the tradeoffs are increasingly confusing, complex, and challenging to manage. For example, workloads can change faster than the time it takes to churn out customized designs. In addition, the AI-specific processes may ex... » read more

An Entangled Heterarchy


For decades, a form of structural hierarchy has been the principal means of handling complexity in chip design. It's not always perfect, and there is no ideal way in which to divide and conquer because that would need to focus on the analysis being performed. In fact, most systems can be viewed from a variety of different hierarchies, equally correct, and together forming a heterarchy. The e... » read more

Damage Detection For Reliable Microelectronics


Over the past few years, the reliability and safety of electronic systems have become increasingly more important. Ongoing digitalization has made these systems an integral part of many items of daily use. This means that failures are becoming more and more critical as they can cause considerable disruption – even when they occur in consumer electronics. Today, electronics are also indispensa... » read more

Neural Network Model Quantization On Mobile


The general definition of quantization states that it is the process of mapping continuous infinite values to a smaller set of discrete finite values. In this blog, we will talk about quantization in the context of neural network (NN) models, as the process of reducing the precision of the weights, biases, and activations. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed intege... » read more

SRAM In AI: The Future Of Memory


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about AI and the latest issues in SRAM with Tony Chan Carusone, CTO at Alphawave Semi; Steve Roddy, chief marketing officer at Quadric; and Jongsin Yun, memory technologist at Siemens EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the key characteristics of SRAM that will make it suitable for AI workloads... » read more

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