Blog Review: Aug. 2


Siemens' Katie Tormala points to the need for die attach thermal testing to ensure efficient removal of heat dissipation from power electronics components to prevent premature failure or thermal runaway. Synopsys's Dermott Lynch notes that over 30% of semiconductor failures are attributed to electrostatic discharge, with damage ranging from leakages and shorts to junction and metallization b... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is helping to address the ongoing talent shortage through its newly announced Semiconductor Education Alliance, with a long list of partners, including Arduino, Cadence, Cornell University, Semiconductor Research Corp., STMicroelectronics,Synopsys, Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute, the All-India Council for Technical Education, and the University of Southampton. The Alliance... » read more

Are In-Person Conferences Sustainable?


DAC/Semicon are now over, and while I missed a large part of it due to a stomach bug, I increasingly have a stale taste in my mouth about in-person conferences in general. Let's split things up – an event such as DAC is both an academic conference and a trade show. It has been that way almost since its inception 60 years ago. There are many other conferences that are pure conferences, and the... » read more

A Packet-Based Architecture For Edge AI Inference


Despite significant improvements in throughput, edge AI accelerators (Neural Processing Units, or NPUs) are still often underutilized. Inefficient management of weights and activations leads to fewer available cores utilized for multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations. Edge AI applications frequently need to run on small, low-power devices, limiting the area and power allocated for memory and comp... » read more

Shift Left, Extend Right, Stretch Sideways


The EDA industry has been talking about shift left for a few years, but development flows are now being stretched in two additional ways, extending right to include silicon lifecycle management, and sideways to include safety and security. In addition, safety and security join verification and power as being vertical concerns, and we are increasingly seeing interlinking within those concerns. ... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Chip Design On Cloud


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about how the shift toward chip design on cloud has sped up, whether the benefits of cloud are realized in chip design, and some of the most pressing challenges to chip design on cloud today, with Philip Steinke, fellow, CAD infrastructure and physical design at AMD; Mahesh Turaga, vice president of business development for cloud at Cadence Design Syst... » read more

DAC 2023: Megatrends And The Road Ahead For Design Automation


As Silicon Valley is in the midst of the heat wave the world is experiencing, the recent Design Automation Conference and its exhibition discussed hot technologies. Three megatrends defined the current situation – artificial intelligence (AI), chiplets, and integration. To me, the more exciting aspect of DAC was the discussion of what is ahead for EDA in the decade to come, and for that, the ... » read more

Large-Scale Integration’s Future Depends On Modeling


VLSI is a term that conjures up images of a college textbook, but some of the concepts included in very large-scale integration remain relevant and continue to evolve, while others have fallen by the wayside. The portion of VLSI that remains most relevant for semiconductor industry is "integration," which is pushing well beyond the edges of a monolithic planar chip. But that expansion also i... » read more

Context-Aware Analysis Can Automatically Protect Critical Nets And Devices During Fill Insertion


Context-aware physical verification (PV) is a relatively new addition to traditional PV flows, but it has quickly become a critical and essential technology that addresses the increasing complexity of geometrical checks used in both established and emerging integrated circuit (IC) technologies. Traditional electronic design automation (EDA) verification tools handle either the physical verifica... » read more

Solving 5G And 6G Challenges With Artificial Intelligence


Wireless networks are inherently complex, generate massive amounts of data, and have grown in complexity with each new generation of technology. This combination of large data sets and complexity makes wireless networks an ideal candidate for AI. People are receiving first-hand experiences of the power and potential of deep neural networks and machine learning (ML) as the technology begins t... » read more

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