Meeting ISO 26262 Requirements Using Tessent IC Test Solutions


As the industry moves towards greater automation in vehicles, suppliers of the ICs used to drive the automotive electronic systems are rapidly adopting solutions to meet ISO 26262 requirements. The Tessent family of IC test products offers the highest defect coverage, in-system non-destructive memory test, hybrid ATPG/Logic BIST, and analog test coverage measurement. These technologies add up t... » read more

Optimization Challenges For Safety And Security


Complexity challenges long-held assumptions. In the past, the semiconductor industry thought it understood performance/area tradeoffs, but over time it became clear this is not so simple. Measuring performance is no longer an absolute. Power has many dimensions including peak, average, total energy and heat, and power and function are tied together. Design teams are now dealing with the impl... » read more

Using Analog For AI


If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the compute platforms for them may be overlooking an alternative technology—analog. The semiconductor industry has a firm understanding of digital electronics and has been very successful making it scale. It is predictable, has good yield, and while every de... » read more

The Basics of Amplitude Modulation


Modulation is the process of varying a higher frequency carrier wave to transmit information. Though it is theoretically possible to transmit baseband signals (or information) without modulating it, it is far more efficient to send data by modulating it onto a higher frequency "carrier wave." Higher frequency waves require smaller antennas, use the available bandwidth more efficiently, and are ... » read more

ON Semiconductor Conquers Verification Challenges


Motor controller IC design for automotive applications, such as power mirror, seats, door locks, and door lift control, creates exceptional verification challenges. Particularly because these ICs must work for over 10 years and they live in harsh environments including -40° C to 150° C temperature ranges, voltages ranging from 7V to 40V, and potential electrostatic discharge and electromagnet... » read more

Hidden Signals: The Memories And Interfaces Enabling IoT, 5G, And AI


This IDC Technology Spotlight Report, sponsored by Rambus, highlights key, often hidden, memory and interface technologies that are enabling high performance electronic systems to serve the disruptive trends of the next decade like IoT, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence. The report discusses: Data and the importance of connectivity, both from the physical (analog) world to the digital wor... » read more

Automated Analog Design Constraint Checking


By Hossam Sarhan and Alexandre Arriordaz Overview Analog integrated circuits (ICs) are used to control and regulate conditions such as temperature, speed, sound, and electrical current. In analog ICs, voltage and current vary continuously at specified points in the circuit. One of the biggest challenges in analog integrated circuit (IC) design is to achieve and maintain accurate ratios: cap... » read more

Why Analog Designs Fail


The gap between analog and digital reliability is growing, and digital designs appear to be winning. Reports show that analog content causes the most test failures and contributes significantly more than digital to field returns. The causes aren't always obvious, though. Some of it is due to the maturity of analog design and verification. While great strides have been made in digital circuit... » read more

In-Memory Computing Challenges Come Into Focus


For the last several decades, gains in computing performance have come by processing larger volumes of data more quickly and with superior precision. Memory and storage space are measured in gigabytes and terabytes now, not kilobytes and megabytes. Processors operate on 64-bit rather than 8-bit chunks of data. And yet the semiconductor industry’s ability to create and collect high quality ... » read more

Unsticking Moore’s Law


Sanjay Natarajan, corporate vice president at Applied Materials with responsibility for transistor, interconnect and memory solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about variation, Moore's Law, the impact of new materials such as cobalt, and different memory architectures and approaches. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Reliability is becoming more of an... » read more

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