From AI Algorithm To Implementation


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the role that EDA has in automating artificial intelligence and machine learning with Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics; Daniel Hansson, CEO of Verifyter; Harry Foster, chief scientist verification for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Manish Pandey, Synopsys fellow; and Raik Brinkmann, CEO ... » read more

Racing To The Edge


The race is on to win a piece of the edge, despite the fact that there is no consistent definition of where the edge begins and ends or how the various pieces will be integrated or ultimately tested. The edge concept originated with the Internet of Things, where the initial idea was that tens of billions of dumb sensors would communicate through gateways to the cloud. That idea persisted unt... » read more

New Approaches To Security


Different approaches are emerging to identify suspicious behavior and shut down potential breaches before they have a chance to do serious damage. This is becoming particularly important in markets where safety is an issue, and in AI and edge devices where the rapid movement of data is essential. These methods are a significant departure from the traditional way of securing devices through l... » read more

3D NAND Metrology Challenges Growing


3D NAND vendors face several challenges to scale their devices to the next level, but one manufacturing technology stands out as much more difficult at each turn—metrology. Metrology, the art of measuring and characterizing structures, is used to pinpoint problems and ensure yields for all chip types. In the case of 3D NAND, the metrology tools are becoming more expensive at each iteration... » read more

Spreading Intelligence From The Cloud To The Edge


The challenge of partitioning processing between the edge and the cloud is beginning to come into focus as chipmakers and systems companies wrestle with a massive and rapidly growing volume of data. There are widely different assessments of how much data this ultimately will include, but everyone agrees it is a very large number. Petabytes are simply rounding errors in this equation, and tha... » read more

The Long And Detailed Road To Automotive Compliance


Compliance with automotive safety requirements is slowing down both innovation and participation by a flurry of startups as the whole ecosystem struggles to bring autonomous vehicles to reality. This is particularly onerous for chipmakers, which face a high bar for IC integrity and reliability. They must meet specifications and be free of design errors. Improper behavior in corner-case s... » read more

March’19 Startup Funding: Money Springs Forth


Another month, another couple of billion-dollar rounds. Singapore-based Grab raised nearly $1.5 billion from the SoftBank Vision Fund, bringing its total private funding to more than $4.5 billion and valuing the company at around $14 billion. Grab has acquired Uber’s ride-hailing business in Southeast Asia and now competes chiefly with Go-Jek of Indonesia in Thailand and other emerging mar... » read more

Big Shift In Multi-Core Design


Hardware and software engineers have a long history of working independently of each other, but that insular behavior is changing in emerging areas such as AI, machine learning and automotive as the emphasis shifts to the system level. As these new markets consume more semiconductor content, they are having a big impact on the overall design process. The starting point in many of these desig... » read more

Heterogeneous Design Creating Havoc With Firmware Versions


Adding different kinds of processing elements into chips is creating system-level incompatibilities because of sometimes necessary, but usually uncoordinated, firmware updates from multiple vendors. In the past, firmware typically was synchronized with other firmware and the chip was verified and debugged. But this becomes much more difficult when multiple heterogeneous processing elements a... » read more

Digital Twins Deciphered


Ever since Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2016, a new phrase has become more common in the semiconductor industry – the digital twin. Exactly what that is, and what impact it will have on the semiconductor industry, is less clear. In fact, many in the industry are scratching their heads over the term. The initial reaction is that the industry has been creating what are now termed digi... » read more

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