Patterns And Issues In AI Chip Design


AI is becoming more than a talking point for chip and system design, taking on increasingly complex tasks that are now competitive requirements in many markets. But the inclusion of AI, along with its machine learning and deep learning subcategories, also has injected widespread confusion and uncertainty into every aspect of electronics. This is partly due to the fact that it touches so many... » read more

The Race Toward Quantum Advantage


Quantum computing has yet to show an advantage over conventional computing, but huge sums of money are betting it will. So far that hasn't happened. Early quantum computers were created in the mid-1990s after mathematicians had demonstrated the effectiveness of applying quantum approaches to some problems. At that stage they were simulated using conventional computing, but it started the rac... » read more

Managing P/P Tradeoffs With Voltage Droop Gets Trickier


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about voltage droop/IR drop with Bill Mullen, distinguished engineer at Ansys; Rajat Chaudhry, product management group director at Cadence; Heidi Barnes, senior applications engineer at Keysight Technologies; Venkatesh Santhanagopalan, product manager at Movellus; Joe Davis, senior director for Calibre interfaces and mPower EM/IR... » read more

Startup Funding: August 2023


August startup funding continued to follow the trends that put AI and autonomous driving at the top of funding. One of August's largest rounds went to a company designing AI processor IP that can scale from the edge to the cloud. Plus, three battery manufacturers brought in one billion dollars or more. This report covers 37 companies that collectively raised $4.2 billion in August 2023. [... » read more

Fab And Field Data Transforming Manufacturing Processes


The ability to capture, process, and analyze data in the field is transforming semiconductor metrology and testing, providing invaluable insight into a product's performance in real-time and under real-world conditions and use cases. Historically, data that encapsulates parameters such as power consumption, temperature, voltages, currents, timing, and other characteristics, was confined to d... » read more

Customizing IC Test To Improve Yield And Reliability


Testing the performance and power of semiconductors as they come off the production line is beginning to shift left in the fab, reversing a long-standing trend of assessing chips just prior to shipping. While this may sound straightforward, it's a difficult challenge which, if successful, will have broad implications for the entire design-through-manufacturing flow. Manufacturers typically g... » read more

Improving Reliability In Chips


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in test that address tracing device quality throughout a product’s lifetime with Tom Katsioulas, CEO at Archon Design Solutions and U.S. Department of Commerce IoT advisory board member; Ming Zhang, vice president of R&D Acceleration at PDF Solutions; and Uzi Baruch, chief strategy officer at proteanTecs. What follows are excerpts of t... » read more

Sweeping Changes For Leading-Edge Chip Architectures


Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power, signaling a fundamental shift from manufacturing-driven designs to those driven by semiconductor architects. In the past, most chips contained one or two leading-edge technologies, mostly to keep pace with the expected improvements i... » read more

The Threat Of Supply Chain Insecurity


Concerns about counterfeit chips are growing as more chips are deployed in safety- and mission-critical applications, prompting better traceability and new and inexpensive solutions that can determine if chips are new or used. But some counterfeit chips still slip through, and the problem gets worse wherever there are shortages. Estimates vary widely for how much counterfeiting costs in term... » read more

Designing Vehicles Virtually


The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), electric vehicles (EVs), and ultimately autonomous vehicles (AVs) is proving the value and exposing the weaknesses in simulating individual components and complete vehicles. The ability to model this intensely complex maze of real-world interactions and possible scenarios is improving, and it's happening faster than comparable road-testing o... » read more

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