Software-Defined Test And Measurement


Software-defined radios, instrumentation and test are ramping up alongside a flood of new technologies related to assisted and autonomous vehicles, 5G, and military/aerospace electronics, breathing new life and significant change into the test and measurement market. Software-defined test adds flexibility in markets where the products and protocols are evolving or still being defined, and wh... » read more

Packaging Chips For Cars


As the complexity of automotive chips grows, so does the complexity of the package. In fact, packaging is becoming increasingly crucial to the performance and reliability of the chips, and both parts need to meet stringent safety standards before they are used inside a vehicle. This is true for all safety-critical applications, but for automotive in particular there are several key reasons w... » read more

Challenges At The Edge


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling Edge computing is inching toward the mainstream as the tech industry begins grappling with the fact that far too much data will be generated by sensors to send everything back to the cloud for processing. The initial idea behind the IoT/IIoT, as well as other connected devices, was that simple sensors would relay raw data to the cloud for processing throug... » read more

Toward Autonomous Farming


While the automotive industry works diligently towards self-driving vehicles, it's possible the carrots you've eaten recently were semi-autonomously planted and harvested with Case IH equipment by Bolthouse Farms, one of the largest carrot growers in the United States. And the U.S. is hardly alone. Autonomous agriculture is coming everywhere, and it's happening much faster than autonomous ca... » read more

Preparing For AI


Suppose an autonomous car is coming up an on-ramp onto a bridge. The ramp is fine, but the bridge is icy, and there’s an overturned bus full of children blocking several lanes. Children are evacuating through the windows and milling around on the pavement. There isn’t time to stop, even with the better-than-human reaction time an autonomous car might have. Swerving to one side might send... » read more

Finding And Fixing ML’s Flaws


OneSpin CEO Raik Brinkmann sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss how to make machine learning more robust, predictable and consistent, and new ways to identify and fix problems that may crop up as these systems are deployed. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How do we make sure devices developed with machine learning behave as they're supposed to, and how do we... » read more

EDA In The Cloud (Part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the migration of EDA tools into the Cloud with Arvind Vel, director of product management at ANSYS; Michal Siwinski, vice president of product management at Cadence; Richard Paw, product marketing manager at DellEMC, Gordon Allan, product manager at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics, Tom Anderson, technical marke... » read more

Partitioning Becomes More Difficult


The divide-and-conquer approach that has been the backbone of verification for decades is becoming more difficult at advanced nodes. There are more interactions from different blocks and features, more power domains, more physical effects to track, and far more complex design rules to follow. This helps explain why the number of tools required on each design—simulation, prototyping, em... » read more

Hidden Costs Of Shifting Left


The term "Shift Left" has been used increasingly within the semiconductor development flow to indicate tasks that were once performed sequentially must now be done concurrently. This is usually due to a tightening of dependences between tasks. One such example being talked about today is the need to perform hardware/software integration much earlier in the flow, rather than leaving it as a sequ... » read more

More Nodes, New Problems


The rollout of leading-edge process nodes is accelerating rather than slowing down, defying predictions that device scaling would begin to subside due to rising costs and the increased difficulty of developing chips at those nodes. Costs are indeed rising. So are the number of design rules, which reflect skyrocketing complexity stemming from multiple patterning, more devices on a chip, and m... » read more

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