Design Considerations In Photonics


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about what CMOS and photonics engineers need to know to successfully collaborate, with James Pond, fellow at Ansys; Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer at Cadence; and Mitch Heins, business development manager for photonic solutions at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussion,... » read more

Research Bits: April 30


Sound waves in optical neural networks Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a way to build reconfigurable recurrent operators based on sound waves for photonic machine learning. They used light to create temporary acoustic waves in an optical fiber, which manipulate subsequent computational steps of an optical rec... » read more

TSMC Uncorks A16 With Super Power Rail


TSMC showed off its forthcoming A16 process technology node, targeted for the second half of 2026, at its 30th North American Technology Symposium this week. As the foundry moves from nanometer to angstrom process numbering, the new nodes will be prefixed with an “A” designation (instead of “N”) and A16 is the first for TSMC. TSMC said that N2 is still tracking to a 2025 production s... » read more

Research Bits: April 23


Probabilistic computer prototype Researchers at Tohoku University and the University of California Santa Barbara created a prototype of a heterogeneous probabilistic computer that combines a CMOS circuit with a limited number of stochastic nanomagnets. It aims to improve the execution of probabilistic algorithms used to solve problems where uncertainty is inherent or where an exact solution... » read more

Research Bits: April 16


Tunable thermal conductivity in memristors Researchers from the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) and Forschungszentrum Juelich discovered that oxide-based memristive devices can demonstrate tunable thermal conductivity. Alongside the memristor's electrical resistive switching, a thermal resistive switching effect also occurs at the metal-oxide inte... » read more

Challenges With Chiplets And Power Delivery


Chiplets hold the potential to deliver the same PPA benefits as an SoC, but with many more features and options that are possible on a reticle-constrained die. If chiplets live up to the hype, they will deliver what is essentially mass customization, democratizing and speeding the delivery of complex chips across a broad array of markets. Today, the focus has been on die-to-die interfaces, but ... » read more

Architecting Chips For High-Performance Computing


The world’s leading hyperscaler cloud data center companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Akamai — are launching heterogeneous, multi-core architectures specifically for the cloud, and the impact is being felt in high-performance CPU development across the chip industry. It's unlikely that any these chips will ever be sold commercially. They are optimized for specific ... » read more

Memory On Logic: The Good And Bad


The chip industry is progressing rapidly toward 3D-ICs, but a simpler step has been shown to provide gains equivalent to a whole node advancement — extracting distributed memories and placing them on top of logic. Memory on logic significantly reduces the distance between logic and directly associated memory. This can increase performance by 22% and reduce power by 36%, according to one re... » read more

Using AI/ML To Minimize IR Drop


IR drop is becoming a much bigger problem as technology nodes scale and more components are packed into advanced packages. This is partly a result of physics, but it's also the result of how the design flow is structured. In most cases, AI/ML can help. The underlying problem is that moving to advanced process nodes, and now 3D-ICs, is driving current densities higher, while the power envelop... » read more

Trusted Electronics: Current And Future Developments


In today’s world, we encounter electronics increasingly as complex hardware/software systems, such as those in vehicles, machines, and communication devices. These systems are characterized by dramatic increases in functionality in areas like environment sensing, stages of autonomy, and the installation of future updates. Developing and manufacturing such electronic systems today requires glo... » read more

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