Always-On DSPs


There are tradeoffs between powering circuits down to save power and waking them up to respond to voice and visual commands. Prakash Madhvapathy, director of product marketing and product management at Cadence, talks about the best ways to deploy digital signal processors, why multiple DSPs are often better than just one, and what penalties there are for various approaches. » read more

Radiation Hardening Chips For Outer Space


What’s the difference between radiation tolerant and radiation hardening, and where is each one used? Minal Sawant, director of the aerospace and defense vertical market at Xilinx, talks about different striations in the Earth’s atmosphere, how those various levels can affect radiation, and what impact that has on the functionality of increasingly dense chip circuits over extended periods o... » read more

Creating IoT Devices That Will Remain Secure


What’s secure today may not be secure in the future, and even if you include an IoT device with state-of-the-art security, it may be surrounded by less secure devices. Steve Hanna, distinguished engineer at Infineon, examines the impact of security on IoT adoption, why resilience across a system is the new target for secure designs, and how to minimize the impact of less secure devices. » read more

End-To-End Traceability


Despite standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508, there are still disconnects and gaps in the supply chain and design-through-manufacturing flows. Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, digs into what's missing, why changes made in one area are not reflected in other areas and throughout the product lifecycle, and why various different phases of the flow don't always match up ... » read more

1.6 Tb/s Ethernet Challenges


Moving data at blazing fast speeds sounds good in theory, but it raises a number of design challenges. John Swanson, senior product marketing manager for high-performance computing digital IP at Synopsys, talks about the impact of next-generation Ethernet on switches, the types of data that need to be considered, the causes of data growth, and the size and structure of data centers, both in the... » read more

Total Critical Area For Optimizing Test Patterns


Increasing complexity at advanced nodes makes it much harder to locate defects and latent defects because there is more surface area to cover and much less space between the various components in a leading-edge chip design. Ron Press, technology enablement director at Siemens Digital Industries Software, talks about why it’s so important to predict where defects are most likely to occur in th... » read more

Growing Challenges With Wafer Bump Inspection


As advanced packaging goes mainstream, ensuring that wafer bumps are consistent has emerged as a critical concern for foundries and OSATs. John Hoffman, computer vision engineering manager at CyberOptics, talks about the shift toward middle-of-line and how that is affecting inspection and metrology, why there is so much concern over co-planarity and alignment, how variation can add up and creat... » read more

Open Cavity Plastic Packaging


Rapid change in electronics is also causing rapid obsolescence. But in some markets, the systems are supposed to last for decades. Sam Sadri, senior process engineer at QP Technologies (formerly Quik-Pak), talks with Semiconductor Engineering about why it’s so important to use existing package footprints, what are the challenges in replacing the circuitry inside a package, and which markets a... » read more

Optimizing AI Systems


Inserting AI and machine learning into chips adds a whole new dimension of complexity, and creates a variety of potential problems, including deadlocks, loss of performance, and difficulty in achieving closure on many fronts. Gajinder Panesar, fellow at Siemens EDA, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changed and how to optimize these new devices and systems by monitoring them f... » read more

Low-Power Always-On Circuits


Some circuits are always on. A smart phone wakes up when it senses a user, and a smart speaker responds to keywords. The challenge is to make sure these devices don’t consume a lot of power while the rest of a device is powered down, that it remains secure, and that it can quickly wake up whatever other functions are needed. All of this requires a significant amount of engineering work. Amol ... » read more

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