New End Markets, More Demand For Complex Chips


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss economic conditions and how that affects chip design with Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of Siemens EDA; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager at Keysight; Simon Segars, advisor at Arm; and Aki Fujimura, chairman and CEO of D2S. This discussion was held in front... » read more

DRAM Choices Becoming Central Design Considerations


Chipmakers are paying much closer attention to various DRAM options as they grapple with what goes on-chip or into a package, elevating attached memory to a critical design element that can affect system performance, power, and cost. These are increasingly important issues to sort through with a number of tradeoffs, but the general consensus is that to reach the higher levels of performance ... » read more

The Challenge Of Optimizing Chip Architectures For Workloads


It isn't possible to optimize a workload running on a system just by looking at hardware or software separately. They need to be developed together and intricately intertwined, an engineering feat that also requires bridging two worlds with have a long history of operating independently. In the early days of computing, hardware and software were designed and built by completely separate team... » read more

Improving PPA With AI


AI/ML/DL is starting to show up in EDA tools for a variety of steps in the semiconductor design flow, many of them aimed at improving performance, reducing power, and speeding time to market by catching errors that humans might overlook. It's unlikely that complex SoCs, or heterogeneous integration in advanced packages, ever will be perfect at first silicon. Still, the number of common error... » read more

Software-Defined Cars


Automotive architectures are becoming increasingly software-driven, a shift that simplifies upgrades and makes it easier to add new features into vehicles. All of this is enabled by the increasing digitalization of automotive functions and features, shifting from mechanical to electrical design, and increasingly from analog to digital data. That enables OEMs to add or up-sell features years ... » read more

Hidden Impacts Of Software Updates


Over-the-air updates can reduce obsolescence over longer chip and system lifetimes, but those updates also can impact reliability, performance, and affect how various resources such as memory and various processing elements are used. The connected world is very familiar with over-the-air (OTA) updates in smart phones and computers, where the software stack — firmware, operating systems, dr... » read more

Where And When End-to-End Analytics Works


With data exploding across all manufacturing steps, the promise of leveraging it from fab to field is beginning to pay off. Engineers are beginning to connect device data across manufacturing and test steps, making it possible to more easily achieve yield and quality goals at lower cost. The key is knowing which process knob will increase yield, which failures can be detected earlier, and wh... » read more

How AI/ML Improves Fab Operations


Chip shortages are forcing fabs and OSATs to maximize capacity and assess how much benefit AI and machine learning can provide. This is particularly important in light of the growth projections by market analysts. The chip manufacturing industry is expected to double in size over the next five years, and collective improvements in factories, AI databases, and tools will be essential for doub... » read more

Lots Of Data, But Uncertainty About What To Do With It


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about silicon lifecycle management in heterogeneous designs, where sensors produce a flood of data, with Prashant Goteti, principal engineer at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; Zoe Conroy, principal hardware engineer at Cisco; Subhasish Mitra, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University... » read more

Building Security Into ICs From The Ground Up


Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, but they also are starting to compromise platforms that until recently were considered unbreakable. Consider blockchains, for example, which were developed as secure, distributed ledger platforms. All of them must be updated with the same data for a transaction to proceed. But earlier this year a blockchain bridge platform calle... » read more

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