Startup Best Practices


Adopting best practices and methodology early will lay the foundation to create a design team that is built to last. While taking the time to develop and implement best practices seems like a luxury a startup cannot afford, nothing is farther from the truth. Best practices are best implemented right from the beginning so it seeps into the DNA of the design team and will pay rich dividends as th... » read more

Data Center Evolution: From Pluggable To Co-Packaged Optics


A torrent of data traffic is growing at an exponential rate driven by applications including 5G, AI/ML, video streaming, online gaming, ADAS and more. Handling this data traffic are hyperscale data centers that have grown to over 500 in number worldwide with a third as many in the pipeline. To scale computing resources to the growing data demands, hyperscale data centers deploy fiber optics thr... » read more

CodaCache: Helping to Break the Memory Wall


As artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicle systems have grown in complexity, system performance needs have begun to conflict with latency and power consumption requirements. This dilemma is forcing semiconductor engineers to re-architect their system-on-chip (SoC) designs to provide more scalable levels of performance, flexibility, efficiency, and integration. From the edge to data ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — data center, edge, IoT, 5G Qualcomm settled its 5G licensing disagreement with Huawei, which will pay $1.8 billion in back royalties and will pay for licensing going forward. Huawei is also now the world’s largest supplier of smartphones, surpassing Samsung Electronics Co. Qualcomm also announced a super-fast charging platform this week for Android devices that is sup... » read more

Pivoting Toward Safety-Critical Verification In Cars


The inclusion of AI chips in automotive and increasingly in avionics has put a spotlight on advanced-node designs that can meet all of the ASIL-D requirements for temperature and stress. How should designers approach this task, particularly when these devices need to last longer than the applications? Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Kurt Shuler, vice president of... » read more

Memory Access In AI Systems


Memory access is a key consideration in AI system design. Ron Lowman, strategic marketing manager for IP at Synopsys, talks about how memory affects overall power consumption, why partitioning of on-chip and off-chip is so critical to performance and power, and how this changes from the cloud to the edge. » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


GPU maker Nvidia may be interested in a purchasing Arm, Bloomberg reports, if current owner Softbank, the Japanese investment group run by billionaire Masayoshi Son, is even selling the company. Softbank may have approached Apple to gauge interest, but Apple reportedly said no. The British-based Arm’s instruction set architecture IP dominates the mobile market, especially with Apple is switch... » read more

eFPGAs Vs. FPGA Chiplets


Embedded FPGAs are a totally different concept from discrete FPGA chiplets, and that is reflected in size, cost, power and performance. Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about which applications are best for each, how each maximizes power and performance, and why choices will vary greatly by application. Related eFPGA Knowledge Center FPGA Knowledge Center Increasing EFPGA Densit... » read more

3 Types Of AI Hardware


As AI chips become more pervasive, three primary approaches are moving to the forefront. Bradley Geden, director of product marketing at Synopsys, looks at how to take advantage of repeatability, what the different flavors look like, the difference between flat and hierarchical design, and what impact black-box arrays have on programmability. » read more

What’s After 5G


This year’s IEEE Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (VLSI 2020) included a presentation by NTT Docomo that looked far into the future of cellular communications, setting the stage for a broad industry shift in communication. This is far from trivial. 5G only just recently entered the commercial world, and — especially with the higher millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies — it has ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →