Shifting Toward Software-Defined Vehicles

By John Koon - 05 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

Apple reportedly is developing a software-defined vehicle. But so are Renault, Hyundai, General Motors, and just about everyone else. Some of the benefits of SDVs include increased comfort, convenience, safety, reliability, and remote software and firmware updates. Preventive and predictive maintenance, and remote diagnostics, can be done more conveniently over the air, while vehicle behavio... » read more

How Secure Are RISC-V Chips?

By Jeff Goldman - 05 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 3

When the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were first uncovered in 2018, they heralded an industry-wide shift in perspective regarding processor security. As the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index put it the following year, "2018 ushered in a new era of hardware security challenges that forced enterprises and the security community to rethink the way they approach hardware security." R... » read more

Competing V2V Technologies Emerge, Create Confusion

By John Koon - 05 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

The battle over vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology has begun, as governments step back to see which of two main competing standards and lots of related technology are best suited for reducing accidents. V2V is an often-discussed wireless communication protocol that enables vehicles to communicate with each other, easing traffic congestion, avoiding accidents, and ultimately improvi... » read more

Startup Funding: December 2022

By Jesse Allen - 04 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

The month of December saw six rounds of $100 million or more. The largest, at a massive half-billion dollars, will support manufacturing of 12-inch monocrystalline silicon polished wafers and epitaxial wafers in China. The company is aiming for a production rate of 1 million pieces a month when current expansion is completed. Also in the half-billion club last month is a company making auton... » read more

Designing For Multiple Die

By Ann Mutschler - 21 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 1

Integrating multiple die or chiplets into a package is proving to be very different than putting them on the same die, where everything is developed at the same node using the same foundry process. As designs become more heterogeneous and disaggregated, they need to be modeled, properly floor-planned, verified, and debugged in the context of a system, rather than as individual components. Typi... » read more

RISC-V Pushes Into The Mainstream

By Marie C. Baca and Ed Sperling - 21 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 1

RISC-V cores are beginning to show up in heterogeneous SoCs and packages, shifting from one-off standalone designs toward mainstream applications where they are used for everything from accelerators and extra processing cores to security applications. These changes are subtle but significant. They point to a growing acceptance that chips or chiplets based on an open-source instruction set ar... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022

By Brian Bailey - 21 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Designing And Securing Chips For Outer Space

By Marie C. Baca - 19 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 2

Design considerations for hardware used in space go far beyond radiation hardening. These devices have to perform flawlessly for years, under extreme temperature variations, and potentially banged up by space junk or other particles floating in the void over its projected lifetime. Reliability in space adds a whole different set of design considerations. For example, while it's unlikely anyo... » read more

How Far Will Copper Interconnects Scale?

By Laura Peters - 15 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

As leading chipmakers continue to scale finFETs — and soon nanosheet transistors — to ever-tighter pitches, the smallest metal lines eventually will become untenable using copper with its liner and barrier metals. What comes next, and when, is still to be determined. There are multiple options being explored, each with its own set of tradeoffs. Ever since IBM introduced the industry to c... » read more

Ferroelectrics: The Dream Of Negative Capacitance

By Katherine Derbyshire - 15 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

Ferroelectrics are getting a serious re-examination, as chipmakers look for new options to maintain drive current. Ferroelectric materials can provide non-volatile memory, serving an important functional gap somewhere between DRAM and flash memory. Indeed, ferroelectrics for memory and 2D channels for transistors were two highlights of the recent IEEE Electron Device Meeting. Ferroelectri... » read more

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Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

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Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

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eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

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New AI Processors Architectures Balance Speed With Efficiency

Hot Chips 24: Large language models ratchet up pressure for sustainable computing and heterogeneous integration; data management becomes key differentiator.