category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Improving EUV Process Efficiency
By Mark LaPedus - 19 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 2

The semiconductor industry is rethinking the manufacturing flow for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in an effort to improve the overall process and reduce waste in the fab. Vendors currently are developing new and potentially breakthrough fab materials and equipment. Those technologies are still in R&D and have yet to be proven. But if they work as planned, they could boost the flo... » read more

Scaling Up Compute-In-Memory Accelerators
By Katherine Derbyshire - 19 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 3

Researchers are zeroing in on new architectures to boost performance by limiting the movement of data in a device, but this is proving to be much harder than it appears. The argument for memory-based computation is familiar by now. Many important computational workloads involve repetitive operations on large datasets. Moving data from memory to the processing unit and back — the so-called ... » read more

The Ins And Outs Of Silicon Carbide
By Ed Sperling - 19 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

John Palmour, CTO at Cree, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about silicon carbide, how it compares to silicon, what's different from a design and packaging standpoint, and where it's being used. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: SiC is well-understood in power electronics and RF, but is the main advantage the ability to run devices hotter than silicon, or is ... » read more

Designing Resilient Electronics
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

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
By Brian Bailey - 16 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

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
By Ann Mutschler - 12 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 1

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
By Brian Bailey - 12 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

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
By SE Staff - 12 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

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

Test Costs Spiking
By Ed Sperling - 10 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 1

The cost of test is rising as a percentage of manufacturing costs, fueled by concerns about reliability of advanced-node designs in cars and data centers, as well as extended lifetimes for chips in those and other markets. For decades, test was limited to a flat 2% of total manufacturing cost, a formula developed prior to the turn of the Millennium after chipmakers and foundries saw the traj... » read more

Taming Novel NVM Non-Determinism
By Bryon Moyer - 10 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 1

New memory technologies may have non-deterministic characteristics that add calibration to the test burden — and may require recalibration during their lifetime. Many of these memories are in development as a result of the search for a storage-class memory (SCM) technology that can bridge the gap between larger, slower memories like flash and faster DRAM memory. There are several approache... » read more

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