Winners And Losers At The Edge


The edge is a vast collection of niches tied to narrow vertical markets, and it is likely to stay that way for years to come. This is both good and bad for semiconductor companies, depending upon where they sit in the ecosystem and their ability to adapt to a constantly shifting landscape. Some segments will see continued or new growth, including EDA, manufacturing equipment, IP, security an... » read more

Variables Complicate Safety-Critical Device Verification


The inclusion of AI chips in automotive and increasingly in avionics has put a spotlight on advanced-node designs that can meet all of the ASIL-D requirements for temperature and stress. How should designers approach this task, particularly when these devices need to last longer than the applications? Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Kurt Shuler, vice president of... » read more

Gaps Emerging In System Integration


The system integration challenge is evolving, but existing tools and methods are not keeping up with the task. New tools and flows are needed to handle global concepts, such as power and thermal, that cannot be dealt with at the block level. As we potentially move into a new era where IP gets delivered as physical pieces of silicon, this lack of an accepted flow will become a stumbling block. ... » read more

Open-Source Hardware Momentum Builds


Open-source hardware continues to gain ground, spearheaded by RISC-V — despite the fact that this processor technology is neither free nor simple to use. Nevertheless, the open-source hardware movement has established a solid foothold after multiple prior forays that yielded only limited success, even for processors. With demand for more customized hardware, and a growing field of startups... » read more

Over-Design, Under-Design Impacts Verification


Designing a complex chip today and getting it out the door on schedule and within budget — while including all of the necessary and anticipated features and standards — is forcing engineering teams to make more tradeoffs than in the past, and those tradeoffs now are occurring throughout the flow. In an ideal system design flow, design teams will have done early, pre-design analysis to se... » read more

2020 CEO Outlook


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the semiconductor industry's outlook and what's changing with Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of IC EDA at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions; Babak Taheri, CEO of Silvaco; John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions; and Prakash Narain, CEO of Real Intent. The conversation was part of the... » read more

ML Opening New Doors For FPGAs


FPGAs have long been used in the early stages of any new digital technology, given their utility for prototyping and rapid evolution. But with machine learning, FPGAs are showing benefits beyond those of more conventional solutions. This opens up a hot new market for FPGAs, which traditionally have been hard to sustain in high-volume production due to pricing, and hard to use for battery-dri... » read more

What’s After PAM-4?


[This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Part 1 can be found here.] The future of high-speed physical signaling is uncertain. While PAM-4 remains one of the key standards today, there is widespread debate about whether PAM-8 will succeed it. This has an impact on everything from where the next bottlenecks are likely to emerge and the best approaches to solving them, to how chips, systems and p... » read more

Challenges In Building Smarter Systems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to define what the edge will look like with Jeff DeAngelis, managing director of the Industrial and Healthcare Business Unit at Maxim Integrated; Norman Chang, chief technologist at Ansys; Andrew Grant, senior director of artificial intelligence at Imagination Technologies; Thomas Ensergueix, senior director of the automotive and IoT line of business at Arm; V... » read more

China Speeds Up Advanced Chip Development


China is accelerating its efforts to advance its domestic semiconductor industry, amid ongoing trade tensions with the West, in hopes of becoming more self-sufficient. The country is still behind in IC technology and is nowhere close to being self-reliant, but it is making noticeable progress. Until recently, China’s domestic chipmakers were stuck with mature foundry processes with no pres... » read more

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