A Journey Of Innovation


When Dr. Shay Wolfling, a physics expert, joined Nova as its CTO about 11 years ago, very little about the company was the same as it is today. Over the past decade, Nova has experienced tremendous growth, acquiring two companies, significantly increasing its revenue and employee count, and shifting its technology direction and product lines. Yet, one constant remains: commitment to innovation ... » read more

Security Highlight: Ascon


The contest for standardization of a lightweight crypto (LWC) algorithm has just finished. US standards body NIST selected Ascon as the winner. Ascon is an algorithm proposed by an international team of scientists that delivers strong performance and security at a low cost. How does that work? Lightweight crypto is symmetric encryption technology, that runs well on constrained systems, lik... » read more

The Importance Of Metal Stack Compatibility For Semi IP


Every foundry and every node is different, but for every foundry/node there are multiple supported metal stacks. Some chips use a lot more metal layers than others. A common rule of thumb is each metal layer increases wafer cost 10%. So, a chip with 5 more metal layers than another will cost 50%+ more. The most complex, high performance chips, including performance FPGAs, typically use AL... » read more

Make The Right Choices For Enhanced Security On RISC-V


Two things are certain to make their presence felt at Embedded World 2023: the growing presence of RISC-V and the importance of safety and security in any embedded system. The breadth of RISC-V applications is expanding rapidly from IoT, mobile devices, to high performance computing, automotive and more. Its adoption, along with RISC-V International memberships, is also expanding from start... » read more

Smart Energy Metering For A Greener Future


One of the key ways we will realize a sustainable future is to optimize—and essentially reduce—our energy usage. Optimization starts with understanding how much energy we consume every day. And to understand this, we must measure the power we consume in everyday applications. The smart meter is an important tool to help us transition to a “greener” use of energy. What is a smart ene... » read more

How Gamification Improves Semiconductor IP Reuse


In today’s increasingly complex semiconductor industry, companies are always looking for new and innovative ways to maximize the value of their Intellectual Property (IP) assets. One way to do this is through the use of crowdsourcing and gamification. Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by enlisting a large number of people, typically through an online platfo... » read more

Tomorrow’s Semiconductor Workforce


With tens of billions directly allocated to spur growth in this essential industry, now is the time for us to focus on a critical challenge: ensuring that as this industry grows exponentially, we create a pipeline for the next generation of semiconductor workers, from the manufacturing floor to the design suites. The semiconductor industry’s growth will ripple throughout the nation, creating ... » read more

Ion Implantation Applications For In-Line SIMS Metrology


By Wei Ti Lee, Sarah Okada, Lawrence Rooney, Feng Zhang, and Benjamin Hickey In the semiconductor industry, ion implantation process has expanded to a wide range of applications with doses and energies spanning several orders of magnitude. Ion implantation is a very complicated process with many parameters and factors that affect the implant profile. For example, shadowing effects from high... » read more

Automotive Growing In 2023


Automotive has to be one of the most fascinating industries where semiconductors and the semiconductor ecosystem are making huge strides. From the evolution of increasingly autonomous vehicles, to more immersive driver and passenger comfort and infotainment experiences, along with additional safety-related features, it’s a rich development environment. I recently had the opportunity to dis... » read more

Security Highlight: Exploiting Persistent Faults In Crypto


At the most recent CHES workshop, Hossein Hadipour of the Graz University of Technology presented an important step forward in exploiting persistent faults in crypto. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is a well-known attack class that can lead to the compromise of a secret key when faults are injected during the execution of a cryptographic implementation. However, injecting transient fault... » read more

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