SiC MOSFETs In The Landscape Of Modern Power Devices


Over the years, low losses possible by high breakdown field made silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs extremely popular amongst engineers. At present, they are mostly used in areas where IGBTs (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors) have been the prevailing component of choice before. But which role do SiC MOSFETs play in today’s landscape of power devices? With SiC MOSFETs (Metal-Oxide-Semicond... » read more

Maximizing Edge AI Performance


Inference of convolutional neural network models is algorithmically straightforward, but to get the fastest performance for your application there are a few pitfalls to keep in mind when deploying. A number of factors make efficient inference difficult, which we will first step through before diving into specific solutions to address and resolve each. By the end of this article, you will be arm... » read more

Unlock Your Vision… And A Bit Of EDA History


Repetitive patterns and hardware designs have something in common: there may be more than meets the eye. Even simple designs can have corner cases that are hard to detect by code review alone, and the situation is even more complex if third-party or legacy IP is involved. What if the IP has a deliberately hidden function? This is where verification tools like OneSpin 360 come in, to remove huma... » read more

What Does RISC-V Stand For?


RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) stands for ‘reduced instruction set computer (RISC) five’. The number five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981. The RISC concept (like the parallel MIPS development in Stanford University) was motivated by the fact that most processor instructions were not... » read more

Processing With FPGAs On Mars


Tasked with finding life in the form of microorganisms, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars at about 04:00 EST on February 18, 2021. The rover has multiple sensors and cameras to collect as much data as possible and, due to the volume of live data being recorded and the long data transmission time from Mars to Earth, a powerful processing system is essential. However, whereas early Mars ro... » read more

Semiconductor CapEx To Grow 13.0% In 2021


Semiconductor capital expenditures grew 9.2% in 2020 to US$112.1 billion. This is $14.1 billion higher than our spring 2020 forecast, and $3.2 billion higher than our fall 2020 forecast. As shown in the graph below, the total 2020 CapEx was $9.4 billion larger than the $102.7 billion spent in 2019. Semico is forecasting 2021 CapEx to reach $127 billion, an increase of 13.0%. Source: Semico... » read more

Greetings From Mars


Hello Mars. Congratulations to the amazing engineers and scientists at NASA and Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) for a successful touchdown on the Mars Jezero Crater. In July 2020, NASA launched the Perseverance rover mission, which sought to find signs of habitable conditions, search for biosignatures, and collect samples for future Mars-sample-return missions and human expeditions. Seven months l... » read more

Long Lead Times Seen For Equipment


There are a number of big stories in the semiconductor market thus far in 2021. Automotive chip shortages and tight foundry capacity are among the bigger ones. That’s just for starters. What hasn’t received much attention is the ongoing shortages and long lead times for semiconductor equipment. In some cases, lead times have stretched out to 12 months or more for some equipment. Some t... » read more

Why New Photoresist Technology Is Critical


As chipmakers move to advanced technology nodes, they are challenged to resolve ever finer features. One of the major roadblocks involves the material used to transfer chip design to the wafer. That material is rapidly reaching its limit to accurately transfer designs. To keep next-generation device scaling on track, a breakthrough technology has been introduced: dry resist. To better understan... » read more

An Insider’s View Of Verifying Custom RISC-V Processor Cores


By Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, Valtrix Systems, and Lee Moore, Imperas Software Supporting images courtesy of Bill McSpadden, Seagate Technology This article is derived from a talk at the RISC-V Summit in December 2020 that Bill McSpadden, principal verification engineer at Seagate Technology, gave on the challenges and experiences his team faced in the verification of two custom RISC-V proce... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →