Is There Still a Future for Hard Disk Drives?


The capacity for solid state drives (SSDs) keeps going up while the price per terabyte keeps falling, sometimes raising questions about the future for hard disk drives (HDDs). Will the cost of SSDs per TB eventually become so low that they will totally displace HDDs? I decided to ask a couple of experts in the field, Jim Handy from Objective Analysis and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. ... » read more

Can Cheaper Lasers Handle Short Distances?


Optical technology is well established for long-haul communications, but the distances it serves are shrinking — especially in the data center. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) already drive short fiber links. But efforts are underway to further scale them down to provide more connections through waveguides than fiber can provide. “We have seen the transition from long... » read more

When Standards Enable Chiplets


Semiconductor Engineering sat down and discussed the need for standards to enable an ecosystem for chiplets with Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology for Marvell; Letizia Giuliano, vice president for product marketing and management at Alphawave Semi; Hee-Soo Lee, HSD segment lead for Keysight; Mick Posner, senior product group director for Cadence’s Compute Solutions Group; and Rob Kr... » read more

Research Bits: July 29


Sort-in-memory Researchers from Peking University and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research developed a sort-in-memory hardware system based on memristors that is tailored for complex, nonlinear sorting tasks. The comparator-free processing-in-memory architecture is built on a one-transistor–one-resistor (1T1R) memristor array, using a Digit Read mechanism that replaces traditional com... » read more

Chiplet Ecosystem Slowly Emerges


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss progress and remaining challenges for designing with chiplets with Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology for Marvell; Letizia Giuliano, vice president for product marketing and management at Alphawave Semi; Hee-Soo Lee, HSD segment lead for Keysight; Mick Posner, senior product group director for Cadence’s Compute S... » read more

Research Bits: July 22


Getting the gold Researchers from Flinders University proposed a new extraction technique for recovering gold from electronic waste and ore that avoids the use of mercury and cyanide, which are often used in small-scale gold recycling and mining operations. “The study featured many innovations including a new and recyclable leaching reagent derived from a compound used to disinfect water,... » read more

Crisis Ahead: Power Consumption In AI Data Centers


AI data centers are consuming energy at roughly four times the rate that more electricity is being added to grids, setting the stage for fundamental shifts in where power is generated, where AI data centers are built, and much more efficient system, chip, and software architectures. The numbers are particularly striking for the United States and China, which are in a race to ramp up AI data ... » read more

Transformers At The Edge: Efficient LLM Deployment


Since the groundbreaking 2017 publication of “Attention Is All You Need,” the transformer architecture has fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence research and development. This innovation laid the foundation for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Video Language Models (VLMs), fueling a wave of productization across the industry. A defining milestone was the public launch of ChatGPT in... » read more

Do We Have Enough Standards For An Open-Chiplet Ecosystem?


For some time now, the semiconductor industry has been discussing the development of an open chiplet ecosystem. The idea is that, rather than having monolithic systems on a chip, it should be possible to combine smaller, specialized chiplets in a modular way – ideally across different manufacturers. Doing so would promise great flexibility with much shorter development times, resulting in muc... » read more

RTL Signoff vs. Functional Signoff: What’s The Difference?


By Bradley Geden and Manoz Palaparthi In semiconductor design, “signoff” is often treated as a single milestone. In practice, however, it encompasses distinct verification phases with unique objectives. Functional signoff and RTL signoff represent two such phases. Both are essential, and each one is focused on different facets of correctness. While functional signoff verifies whether ... » read more

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