Power-Hungry Safety And Security


There is a price to pay for everything. When it comes to adding safety and security into a device, the costs in terms of power and area can be significant, but if the task is taken seriously, those costs can be managed and minimized. New analysis and implementation tools are coming to market that can also help to keep the costs contained. But it also requires the right mindset. As more indus... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2020


Dedicated AI hardware, quantum computing, and avionics startups shined in March. Here's a look at seventeen startups, which raised a collective $525M. The avionics sector soared thanks to Lilium and its electric vertical takeoff jet. Quantum computing was another hot area, with three companies bringing in ~$88M together. Plus, chip design management, two companies developing AR glasses, and how... » read more

Designing Resilient Electronics


Electronic systems in automobiles, airplanes and other industrial applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, required to perform an expanding list of functions while also becoming smaller and lighter. As a result, pressure is growing to design extremely high-performance chips with lower energy consumption and less sensitivity to harsh environmental conditions. If this ... » read more

HBM Issues In AI Systems


All systems face limitations, and as one limitation is removed, another is revealed that had remained hidden. It is highly likely that this game of Whac-A-Mole will play out in AI systems that employ high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Most systems are limited by memory bandwidth. Compute systems in general have maintained an increase in memory interface performance that barely matches the gains in... » read more

Power Management Becomes Top Issue Everywhere


Power management is becoming a bigger challenge across a wide variety of applications, from consumer products such as televisions and set-top-boxes to large data centers, where the cost of cooling server racks to offset the impact of thermal dissipation can be enormous. Several years ago, low-power design was largely relegated to mobile devices that were dependent on a battery. Since then, i... » read more

Power Challenges In ML Processors


The design of artificial intelligence (AI) chips or machine learning (ML) systems requires that designers and architects use every trick in the book and then learn some new ones if they are to be successful. Call it style, call it architecture, there are some designs that are just better than others. When it comes to power, there are plenty of ways that small changes can make large differences.... » read more

The Long Road To Quantum Computing


Building a quantum computer is like building a cathedral. They both take a couple generations. The time frame for useful quantum computing applications that are not toy-sized is still a few years to a decade or more away. But the push is on now. Governments are racing to get their country’s quantum computing going for national security reasons. Companies such as Google and IBM are competin... » read more

Wrestling With Variation In Advanced Node Designs


Variation is becoming a major headache at advanced nodes, and issues that used to be dealt with in the fab now must be dealt with on the design side, as well. What is fundamentally changing is that margin, which has long been used as a buffer for variation and other manufacturing process-related problems, no longer works in these leading-edge designs for a couple of reasons. First, margin im... » read more

Reducing Power At RTL


Power management and reduction at the register transfer level is becoming more problematic as more heterogeneous elements are added into advanced designs and more components are dependent on interactions with other components. This has been a growing problem in leading-edge designs for the past couple of process nodes, but similar issues have begun creeping into less-sophisticated designs as... » read more

Brighter Future For Photonics


Photons increasingly are taking over where electrons are failing in communications, but mixing the two never has been easy. There always have been two potential implementation paths — building each on its own substrate and then stacking them, or building them on a single substrate. The tradeoff between the two solutions is more complex than it may initially appear, and ongoing improvements... » read more

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