Safety, Security And PPA Tradeoffs


Safety and security are emerging as key design tradeoffs as chips are added into safety-critical markets, adding even more complexity into an already complicated optimization process. In the early days of semiconductor design, performance and area were traded off against each other. Then power became important, and the main tradeoffs became power, performance and area (PPA). But as chips inc... » read more

Embedded Flash Scaling Limits


Embedded nonvolatile flash memory has played a key role in chips for years, but the technology is beginning to face some scaling and cost roadblocks and it’s not clear what comes next. Embedded flash is used in several markets, such as automotive, consumer and industrial. But the automotive sector appears to be the most concerned about the future of the technology. Typically, a car incorpo... » read more

Fabs Meet Machine Learning


Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss Moore’s Law and photomask technology. Fujimura also explained how artificial intelligence and machine learning are impacting the IC industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: For some time, you’ve said we need more compute power. So we need faster chips at advanced nodes, but cost... » read more

FD-SOI Going Mainstream


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in the FD-SOI world and what's behind them, with James Lamb, deputy CTO for advanced semiconductor manufacturing and corporate technical fellow at Brewer Science; Giorgio Cesana, director of technical marketing at STMicroelectronics; Olivier Vatel, senior vice president and CTO at Screen Semiconductor Solutions; and Carlos Mazure, CTO at Soi... » read more

Data Center Power Poised To Rise


The big power-saving effort that kept U.S. data-center power consumption low for the past decade may not keep the lid on much longer. Faced with the possibility that data centers would consume a disastrously large percentage of the world's power supply, data center owners, and players in the computer, semiconductor, power and cooling industries ramped up effort to improve the efficiency of e... » read more

5nm Design Progress


Activity surrounding the 5nm manufacturing process node is quickly ramping, creating a better picture of the myriad and increasingly complex design issues that must be overcome. Progress at each new node after 28nm has required an increasingly tight partnership between the foundries, which are developing new processes and rule decks, along with EDA and IP vendors, which are adding tools, met... » read more

Architecting For AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about what is needed today to enable artificial intelligence training and inferencing with Manoj Roge, vice president, strategic planning at Achronix; Ty Garibay, CTO at Arteris IP; Chris Rowen, CEO of Babblelabs; David White, distinguished engineer at Cadence; Cheng Wang, senior VP engineering at Flex Logix; and Raik Brinkmann, president and CEO of O... » read more

Five DAC Keynotes


The ending of Moore's Law may be about to create a new golden age for design, especially one fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning. But design will become task-, application- and domain-specific, and will require that we think about the lifecycle of the products in a different way. In the future, we also will have to design for augmentation of experience, not just automation... » read more

Bridges Vs. Interposers


The number of technology options continue to grow for advanced packaging, including new and different ways to incorporate so-called silicon bridges in products. For some time, Intel has offered a silicon bridge technology called Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), which makes use of a tiny piece of silicon with routing layers that connects one chip to another in an IC package. In ... » read more

How To Test Autonomous Vehicles


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling The race is on to develop ways of testing autonomous vehicles to prove they are safe under most road conditions, but this has turned out to be much more difficult than initially thought. The autonomous vehicle technology itself is still in various stages of development, with carmakers struggling to fine-tune AI algorithms that can guide robots on wheels th... » read more

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