category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Steering The Semiconductor Industry
By Brian Bailey - 26 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 2

Progress in semiconductors has been one of the most successful engineering feats, and the industry has ridden an exponential curve longer than anything else in history. It is also a highly conservative industry that has pushed away many disruptive changes in favor of small incremental changes that minimize risk. There have been significant changes over the decades, and they often required a ... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry
By Ed Sperling - 02 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 2

The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Challenges For New AI Processor Architectures
By Brian Bailey - 29 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Investment money is flooding into the development of new AI processors for the data center, but the problems here are unique, the results are unpredictable, and the competition has deep pockets and very sticky products. The biggest issue may be insufficient data about the end market. When designing a new AI processor, every design team has to answer one fundamental question — how much flex... » read more

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design
By Ann Mutschler - 29 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Data centers are undergoing a fundamental change, shifting from standard processing models to more data-centric approaches based upon customized hardware, less movement of data, and more pooling of resources. Driven by a flood of web searches, Bitcoin mining, video streaming, data centers are in a race to provide the most efficient and fastest processing possible. But because there are so ma... » read more

Continuous Education For Engineers
By Brian Bailey - 29 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Continuous education is essential for engineers, but many companies don't recognize the value or they are unwilling to provide the necessary resources. This should be a line of questioning before every new hire makes the decision about where they want to work, because it not only affects their future career, but also impacts the value they can provide to that company during the course of the... » read more

CEO Outlook: Chiplets, Longer IC Lifetimes, More End Markets
By Ed Sperling - 14 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 1

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chiplets, longer IC lifetimes, and a spike in the number of end applications with Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of Siemens IC EDA; John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; Dean Drako, president and CEO of IC Manage; an... » read more

Debug: The Schedule Killer
By Brian Bailey - 30 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 0

Debug often has been labeled the curse of management and schedules. It is considered unpredictable and often can happen close to the end of the development cycle, or even after – leading to frantic attempts at work-arounds. And the problem is growing. "Historically, about 40% of time is spent in debug, and that aspect is becoming more complex," says Vijay Chobisa, director of product manag... » read more

Data Centers On Wheels
By Ann Mutschler - 28 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 2

Automotive architectures are evolving quickly from domain-based to zonal, leveraging the same kind of high-performance computing now found in data centers to make split-second decisions on the road. This is the third major shift in automotive architectures in the past five years, and it's one that centralizes processing using 7nm and 5nm technology, specialized accelerators, high-speed memor... » read more

Rocky Road To Designing Chips In The Cloud
By Ann Mutschler - 24 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 0

EDA is moving to the cloud in fits and starts as tool vendors sort out complex financial models and tradeoffs while recognizing a potentially big new opportunity to provide unlimited processing capacity using a pay-as-you-go approach. By all accounts, a tremendous amount of tire-kicking is happening now as EDA vendors and users delve into the how and why of moving to the cloud for chip desig... » read more

Architectural Considerations For AI
By Brian Bailey - 24 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 2

Custom chips, labeled as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), are appearing on a weekly basis, each claiming to be 10X faster than existing devices or consume 1/10 the power. Whether that is enough to dethrone existing architectures, such as GPUs and FPGAs, or whether they will survive alongside those architectures isn't clear yet. The problem, or the opportunity, is that t... » read more

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