HW and SW Architecture Approaches For Running AI Models


How best to run AI inference models is a current topic of much debate as a wide breadth of systems companies look to add AI to a variety of systems, spurring both hardware innovation and the need to revamp models. Hardware developers are making progress with AI accelerators and SoCs. But on the model side, questions abound about whether the answer might come from revisiting older, less compl... » read more

RISC-V Conformance


Experts At The Table: Despite growing excitement and participation in the development of the RISC-V ecosystem, significant holes remain in the development flow. One of the most concerning is conformance, which must exist before software portability becomes possible. Semiconductor Engineering discussed the issue with John Min, vice president of customer service at Arteris; Zdeněk Přikryl, CTO... » read more

2D Semiconductors Make Progress, But So Does Silicon


Semiconductor industry researchers have been anticipating the need for better transistor channel materials to replace silicon for a long time, but silicon devices have continued to improve enough to postpone that change. Silicon continues to provide an unmatched combination of device performance, manufacturability, and cost effectiveness. In recent years, though, the “end of silicon” cha... » read more

Advanced Packaging Driving New Collaboration Across Supply Chain


The semiconductor industry is undergoing a profound shift in packaging technologies to ones that rely on close collaboration among multiple stakeholders to solve intricate, multi-faceted, and extraordinarily complex problems. At the heart of this change is the convergence of heterogeneous integration, chiplets, and 3D stacking. Heterogeneous approaches allow companies to combine different te... » read more

New Approaches To Power Decoupling


Decoupling capacitors have long been an important aspect of maintaining a clean power source for integrated circuits, but with noise caused by rising clock frequencies, multiple power domains, and various types of advanced packaging, new approaches are needed. Power is a much more important factor than it used to be, especially in the era of AI. “Doing an AI search consumes 10X the power t... » read more

Monolithic Vs. Heterogeneous Integration


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss two very different paths forward for semiconductors and what's needed for each, with Jamie Schaeffer, vice president of product management at GlobalFoundries; Dechao Guo, director of advanced logic technology R&D at IBM; Dave Thompson, vice president at Intel; Mustafa Badaroglu, principal engineer at Qualcomm; and Thomas Po... » read more

Americas Chip Funding Energizes Industry


This is the second in a series of articles tracking government chip investments. See part one here (global),  part 3 covering EMEA is here and Asia here. Since the first announcement of a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with BAE Systems in December 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce has rolled out comprehensive plans to support more than a dozen companies in order to shore up... » read more

LLMs Show Promise In Secure IC Design


The introduction of large language models into the EDA flow could significantly reduce the time, effort, and cost of designing secure chips and systems, but they also could open the door to more sophisticated attacks. It's still early days for the use of LLMs in chip and system design. The technology is just beginning to be implemented, and there are numerous technical challenges that must b... » read more

How Big A Deal Is Aging?


Nothing lasts forever, but in the semiconductor world things used to last long enough to become obsolete long before their end of life. That's no longer the case with newer nodes, and it is raising concerns in safety-critical markets such as automotive. Being able to fully understand what happens inside of chips is still a work in progress, and analysis approaches are trying to keep up. Unti... » read more

Unbundling Analog From Digital Where It Makes Sense


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's changing in analog design with the shift toward heterogeneous integration and more safety- and mission-critical applications with Mo Faisal, president and CEO of Movellus; Hany Elhak, executive director of product management at Synopsys; Cedric Pujol, product manager at Keysight; and Pradeep Thiagarajan, principal product manager for custom I... » read more

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