Challenges With Adaptive Control


Historically, the performance and power consumption of a system was controlled by what could be done at design time, but chips today are becoming a lot more adaptive. This has become a necessity for cutting edge nodes, but also provides a lot of additional benefits at the expense of greater complexity and verification challenges. Design margins are a tradeoff between performance and yield. C... » read more

Don’t Let Your ML Accelerator Vendor Tell You The ‘F-Word’


Machine learning (ML) inference in devices is all the rage. Nearly every new system on chip (SoC) design start for mobile phones, tablets, smart security cameras, automotive applications, wireless systems, and more has a requirement for a hefty amount of ML capability on-chip. That has silicon design teams scrambling to find ML processing power to add to the existing menu of processing engines ... » read more

Improving Chip Efficiency, Reliability, And Adaptability


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits' Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new models and approaches for ensuring the integrity and responsiveness of systems, and how this can be done within a given power budget and at various speeds. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are y... » read more

Bridging The Digital Divide With Ultra Low-Cost Smartphones


According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2.5 billion people in emerging economies now have access to mobile broadband coverage, but many still cannot afford the typical smartphone. They need a device that hits the right price point, and also provides the right capabilities to support and enhance them in their daily lives. Despite greater connectivity, hitting this ‘smartphone sweet... » read more

Ensuring Signal And Power Integrity In Today’s High-Speed Designs


Leading-edge chip desiLeading-edge chip design was never easy, but it’s getting harder all the time. Rapid advances in communication systems are driving data rates higher. With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the increased need for data processing, high quality data transfer is increasingly critical. Faster data rates and more complex protocols are exacerbating ... » read more

Advanced Auto-Routing For TSMC InFO Technologies


At the recent TSMC OIP Symposium, John Park presented 'Advanced Auto-Routing for TSMC InFO Technologies.' InFO stands for "integrated fanout" and is the lower performance, lower complexity technology for advanced packaging. For details of TSMC's whole packaging portfolio, see my post TSMC OIP: 3DFabric Alliance and 3Dblox. Here's the slide TSMC presented from that presentation on InFO. As you... » read more

Making Electric Vehicles Go Further With New Materials


It’s no secret that vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are aggressively pursuing electric vehicle (EV) development. Among the headwinds they face in selling their technology to consumers are price and vehicle range. Not surprisingly, there is a direct correlation between the two — in 2021, for any EV under $40,000, the average vehicle range was 187 miles, while the lowest veh... » read more

Holistic Die-to-Die Interface Design Methodology For 2.5-D Multi-Chip-Module Systems


More than Moore technologies can be supported by system level diversification enabled by chiplet based integrated systems within multi-chip-modules (MCM) and silicon interposer based 2.5D systems. The division of large system-on-chip dies into smaller chiplets with different technology nodes specific to the chiplet application requirement enables the performance enhancement at system level whil... » read more

Startup Funding: November 2022


November was a month for mega-rounds, with ten companies receiving investments of at least $100 million. One of those is a startup providing connectivity solutions for data centers and enabling use of the memory pooling functionality in the latest update to the CXL standard. Two quantum computer startups were part of the $100M+ club this month — one using very cold atoms to take on not only q... » read more

Physics-Based Radar Modeling: Driving Toward Increased Safety


Autonomous driving is revolutionizing the global automotive industry. With every new model, cars are smarter and more capable of independently responding to external signals like lane markings, road signs, other cars and pedestrians. However, formulating a correct response via artificial intelligence depends on the flawless performance of the car’s perception systems, including radar-ba... » read more

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