category: Special Reports

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Bulk CMOS Vs. FD-SOI
By Mark LaPedus - 19 May, 2016 - Comments: 2

The leading edge of the chip market increasingly is divided over whether to move to finFETs or whether to stay at 28nm using different materials and potentially even advanced packaging. Decisions about which approach to take frequently boil down to performance, power, form factor, cost, and the maturity of the individual technologies. All of those can vary by market, by vendor and by process... » read more

FinFET Scaling Reaches Thermal Limit
By Brian Bailey - 12 May, 2016 - Comments: 2

In 1974, Robert H. Dennard was working as an IBM researcher. He introduced the idea that MOSFETs would continue to work as voltage-controlled switches in conjunction with shrinking features, providing doping levels, the chip's geometry, and voltages are scaled along with those size reductions. This became known as Dennard's Law even though, just like Moore's Law, it was anything but a law. T... » read more

Rethinking Processor Architectures
By Ed Sperling - 05 May, 2016 - Comments: 2

The semiconductor industry's obsession with clock speeds, cores and how many transistors fit on a piece of silicon may be nearing an end for real this time. The [getentity id="22048" comment="IEEE"] said it will develop the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specifi... » read more

10nm Versus 7nm
By Mark LaPedus - 25 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 20

The silicon foundry business is heating up, as vendors continue to ramp their 16nm/14nm finFET processes. At the same time, they are racing each other to ship the next technologies on the roadmap—10nm and 7nm. But the landscape is complicated, with each vendor taking a different strategy. [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"], for one, plans to ship its 10nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="fi... » read more

Convolutional Neural Networks Power Ahead
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 0

While the term may not be immediately recognizable, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are already part of our daily lives—and they are expected to become even more significant in the near future. [getkc id="261" kc_name="Convolutional neural networks"] are a form of machine learning modeled on the way the brain's visual cortex distinguishes one object from another. That helps explain wh... » read more

Mobile Edge Computing For The IoE
By Ernest Worthman - 07 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 0

More attention is being focused on the edges of networks as the IoE begins taking hold. The reason is that the current wireless infrastructure is inadequate for handling the billions of endpoints that will make up the IoE. So for the IoE to realize its full potential, it will either require some sort of add-on infrastructure or a new discovery in physics. Edge networks were not always suc... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 2)
By Ed Sperling - 21 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 1

New chip architectures and new packaging options—including fan-outs and 2.5D—are changing basic design considerations for how many cores are needed, what they are used for, and how to solve some increasingly troublesome bottlenecks. As reported in part one, just adding more cores doesn't necessarily improve performance, and adding the wrong size or kinds of cores wastes power. That has s... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 1)
By Ed Sperling - 10 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 2

The optimal number of processor cores in chip designs is becoming less obvious, in part due to new design and architectural options that make it harder to draw clear comparisons, and in part because just throwing more cores at a problem does not guarantee better performance. This is hardly a new problem, but it does have a sizable list of new permutations and variables—right-sized heteroge... » read more

7nm Lithography Choices
By Mark LaPedus - 07 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 2

Chipmakers are ramping up their 16nm/14nm logic processes, with 10nm expected to move into early production later this year. Barring a major breakthrough in lithography, chipmakers are using today’s 193nm immersion and multiple patterning for both 16/14nm and 10nm. Now, chipmakers are focusing on the lithography options for 7nm. For this, they hope to use a combination of two technologies ... » read more

Back Doors Are Everywhere
By Ernest Worthman - 03 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 0

By Ernest Worthman & Ed Sperling Back doors have been a part of chip design since the beginning. One of the first open references was in the 1983 movie "War Games," which features a young computer whiz who uses one to hack into a computer that controls the United States' nuclear arsenal. In reality, modern back doors predate Hollywood's discovery by about 20 years, starting in 1965 wi... » read more

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