A Learning Machine For Machine Learning

By Mike Gianfagna - 29 Jun, 2017 - Comments: 0

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are hot. Many, many startups, exciting new applications and lots of venture money. The technology promises to change the world. Whether it’s autonomous vehicles, domestic robots or machines that replace doctors and lawyers, the implications are astounding, and somewhat frightening. Let’s put the socio-economic dimension of this discussion aside f... » read more

Historic FinFET/2.5D Firsts

By Mike Gianfagna - 27 Apr, 2017 - Comments: 0

Recently, I had an opportunity to watch the Academy Award nominated movie “Hidden Figures.” If you’re a geek at heart, you need to see this movie. It chronicles the strong contributions of three black women to the NASA space program during the 1960s. The civil rights backstory of the movie is powerful, but there is another aspect of the movie that stayed with me as well: all of the “fir... » read more

Advanced ASICs Are A Team Sport

By Mike Gianfagna - 23 Feb, 2017 - Comments: 0

The recent Super Bowl proved that a team with conviction and focus can do anything. This notion comes in handy when you think about the nearly impossible job of designing and manufacturing an advanced ASIC – in finFET technologies, with an interposer, multiple die, and never-before-proven throughput rates. For these kind of advanced technologies, it does take a village. What works is open, tr... » read more

Rush Hour On The Technology Roadmap

By Mike Gianfagna - 30 Jan, 2017 - Comments: 0

Starting this week, the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) will commence at the Marriott in downtown San Francisco. This prestigious conference showcases the latest semiconductor innovations from around the world. Looking at the advance program, one can’t help but notice a shift in the work presented. The conference theme this year is: “Intelligent Chips for a Smart World... » read more

All I Want For Christmas…

By Mike Gianfagna - 22 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

As I write this, we’re heading into the 2016 holiday season. December 21 is also the shortest day of the year, so I better get right to the point. 2016 has been a year of many surprises. The spectacular consolidation in the semiconductor industry has permanently altered the landscape. It has created new, world-class capability and left a few gaps as well. 2.5D designs are finally moving ... » read more

IoT – And A Tear In The Fabric Of The Connected World

By Mike Gianfagna - 27 Oct, 2016 - Comments: 0

Billions of connected things. Massive silicon consumption. Exponentially rising data volumes. Global compute farm build-out to make sense out of all of it. Lots of dollar signs. Everyone is talking about IoT with an optimistic view toward the future. There is a dark side to all this. Many, including yours truly have written about it. If you’re familiar with the Terminator series, you can call... » read more

Designers: Take Control Of Your Chip

By Mike Gianfagna - 29 Sep, 2016 - Comments: 0

This is a familiar story for us – maybe it is for you, too. From time to time, a customer contacts us and says they have a design in mind, but they just can’t fit in the package, or meet the power budget, or meet timing. Fifty percent or more of the area for many of the chips we see is composed of memory. So we start there. After a Pareto analysis of the memory sub-system, we typically find... » read more

Automation: When Should We Stop?

By Mike Gianfagna - 25 Aug, 2016 - Comments: 0

Automating tasks has become quite popular. Driver assist is a good example. So is any machine learning application. You may have noticed that you can now get deliveries in less than 24 hours on Amazon. There is huge automation behind that service. So the question becomes, when is enough, enough? When does automation hit the law of diminishing return? When does this all become “creeping featur... » read more

Power To The People (Right On…)

By Mike Gianfagna - 30 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

If you’re the right age (or older), you will immediately think of John Lennon when you read the title of this piece. The song was released in 1971, so I will cut many of you some slack on that. The title was inspired by several pieces of research that I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this past week. I am currently in Vancouver, British Columbia at the NEWCAS conference. NEWCAS... » read more

On The Verge

By Mike Gianfagna - 27 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 0

Anyone who has been following the IoT/IoE or whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement knows we’re on the eve of far-reaching, life-altering change. There will be billions of connected devices, all streaming information to gigascale cloud datacenters using big data analytics and deep machine learning. Somewhere along the way, we’ll discover important, useful information from all this tha... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →

Knowledge Centers
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

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

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

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

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

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

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

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.

by Ed Sperling

category: Semi Thoughts

category: IoT, Security & Automotive