Cities Strive For More Smarts, Security


As cities around the world move beyond their first completed smart city projects and add more systems, they face hurdles in expanding but have more standards, technical resources, and real-world examples to draw on when making project design decisions. The main concern is keeping the smart city systems and their data and functions safe, especially if the system is touching critical infrastructu... » read more

Chip Backdoors: Assessing the Threat


In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek made an explosive claim: Chinese spies had implanted backdoors in motherboards used by some high-profile customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense. All of those customers issued strongly worded denials. Most reports of hardware backdoors have ended up in exchanges like these. There are allegations and counter-allegations about specifics. But as hardw... » read more

Is Standardization Required For Security?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip and system security with Mike Borza, fellow and scientist on the security IP team at Synopsys; Lee Harrison, automotive IC test solutions manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Jason Oberg, founder and CTO of Cycuity (formerly Tortuga Logic); Nicole Fern, senior security analyst at Riscure; Norman Chang, fellow and CTO of the electroni... » read more

Startup Funding: July 2022


Quantum computing may seem like a futuristic technology, but computation based on superposition and entanglement is here and investors are eager to get behind it. Two of July's rounds that passed the $100 million mark were for superconducting quantum processor companies, one of which is also developing EDA software to assist in designing quantum circuits. And it's not just mega-rounds. Two quan... » read more

Need Design Talent? Create a Contest


Amid a labor crunch for qualified engineers, semiconductor ecosystem participants are coming up with new strategies to entice university students, such as design competitions. In one design competition sponsored by Renesas earlier this year for European university students and their educators, teams were tasked with building a self-guided robot that could drive along a track in a virtual sim... » read more

Scaling, Advanced Packaging, Or Both


Chipmakers are facing a growing number of challenges and tradeoffs at the leading edge, where the cost of process shrinks is already exorbitant and rising. While it's theoretically possible to scale digital logic to 10 angstroms (1nm) and below, the likelihood of a planar SoC being developed at that nodes appears increasingly unlikely. This is hardly shocking in an industry that has heard pr... » read more

Customizing Processors


The design, verification, and implementation of a processor is the core competence of some companies, but others just want to whip up a small processor as quickly and cheaply as possible. What tools and options exist? Processors range from very small, simple cores that are deeply embedded into products to those operating at the highest possible clock speeds and throughputs in data centers. I... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Redefines Custom ASICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss bespoke silicon and what's driving that customization with Kam Kittrell, vice president of product management in the Digital & Signoff group at Cadence; Rupert Baines, chief marketing officer at Codasip; Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas; Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus; Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of Siemens... » read more

Distilling The Essence Of Four DAC Keynotes


Chip design and verification are facing a growing number of challenges. How they will be solved — particularly with the addition of machine learning — is a major question for the EDA industry, and it was a common theme among four keynote speakers at this month's Design Automation Conference. DAC has returned as a live event, and this year's keynotes involved the leaders of a systems comp... » read more

Fab Investments Head Toward Record High


Corporations and governments around the globe are making record-breaking investments in chip manufacturing plants amid a major push to make the semiconductor supply chain more robust and less prone to shortages caused by everything from market variations to geopolitical interruptions. These investments — which range from updating existing fabrication facilities to building entirely new fab... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →