category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

SiC Demand Growing Faster Than Supply
By Mark LaPedus - 23 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

The silicon carbide (SiC) industry is in the midst of a major expansion campaign, but suppliers are struggling to meet potential demand for SiC power devices and wafers in the market. In just one example of the expansion efforts, Cree plans to invest up to $1 billion to increase its SiC fab and wafer capacities. As part of the plan, Cree is developing the world’s first 200mm (8-inch) SiC f... » read more

Partitioning In 3D
By Katherine Derbyshire - 23 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

The best way to improve transistor density isn't necessarily to cram more of them onto a single die. Moore’s Law in its original form stated that device density doubles about every two years while cost remains constant. It relied on the observation that the cost of a processed silicon wafer remained constant regardless of the number of devices printed on it, which in turn depended on litho... » read more

Controlling Variability And Cost At 3nm And Beyond
By Ed Sperling - 22 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Richard Gottscho, executive vice president and CTO of Lam Research, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to utilize more data from sensors in manufacturing equipment, the migration to new process nodes, and advancements in ALE and materials that could have a big impact on controlling costs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As more sensors are added int... » read more

Evolution Of Verification Engineers
By Brian Bailey - 22 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the implications of having an executable specification that drives verification with Hagai Arbel, chief executive officer for VTool; Adnan Hamid, chief executive office for Breker Verification; Mark Olen, product marketing manager for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures; Sharon Rosenberg, senior solutions archit... » read more

In-Chip Monitoring Becoming Essential Below 10nm
By Ann Steffora Mutschler - 20 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Rising systemic complexity and more potential interactions in heterogeneous designs is making it much more difficult to ensure a chip, or even a block within a chip, will functioning properly without actually monitoring that behavior in real-time. Continuous and sporadic monitoring have been creeping into designs for the past couple of decades. But it hasn’t always been clear how effective... » read more

Is ADAS The Edge?
By Ann Steffora Mutschler - 16 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Debate is brewing over whether ADAS applications fall on the edge, or if they are better viewed squarely within the context of the automotive camp. There is more to this discussion than just semantics. The edge represents a huge greenfield opportunity for electronics of all sorts, and companies from the mobile market and from the cloud are both rushing to stake their claim. At this point the... » read more

Can The Hardware Supply Chain Remain Secure?
By Andy Patrizio - 15 May, 2019 - Comments: 2

Malware in computers has been a reality since the 1990s, but lately the focus has shifted to hardware. So far, the semiconductor industry has been lucky because well-publicized threats were either limited or unproven. But sooner or later, luck runs out. Last year saw two significant incidents that shook people’s faith in the integrity of hardware security. The first was the Meltdown/Spectr... » read more

The Growing Uncertainty Of Sign-Off At 7/5nm
By Ann Steffora Mutschler - 09 May, 2019 - Comments: 2

Having enough confidence in designs to sign off prior to manufacturing is becoming far more difficult at 7/5nm. It is taking longer due to increasing transistor density, thinner gate oxides, and many more power-related operations that can disrupt signal integrity and impact reliability.  For many years, designers have performed design rule checks as part of physical verification of the desi... » read more

The Limits Of Energy Harvesting
By Ed Sperling and Kevin Fogarty - 09 May, 2019 - Comments: 2

Energy harvesting, once considered an inexpensive alternative to low-power design and a way of achieving nearly unlimited power in mobile devices, has settled down to more modest expectations. This approach to generating energy through a variety of means—from solar to motion to ambient RF and even pH differences between soil and trees—has been proven to work. The problem is that it doesn... » read more

Raising The Abstraction Level For Power
By Brian Bailey - 09 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Power-aware design is still a relatively new concern for many semiconductor products, and since inception it has changed several times and in different ways. Initially people were concerned about peak power. Today, they care about peak, total energy, thermal and other effects. The industry has tried several abstractions ranging from system-level analysis, which promised to swamp implementati... » read more

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