Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government will grant licenses to NVIDIA and AMD to again sell some AI chips — NVIDIA's H20 GPU and AMD's MI308 — to Chinese companies. TrendForce projects that the availability of NVIDIA chips, in particular, will create a surge in demand from Chinese AI firms and cloud service providers, and boost high-bandwidth memory (HBM) consumption. The move could raise China’s share of... » read more

Designing The AI Factories: Unlocking Innovation With Intelligent IP


The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the technological landscape, driving unprecedented demands on computing infrastructure. At the heart of this transformation lie innovations in intellectual property (IP) that enable scalable, efficient, and performance-driven AI factories. These advancements are central to addressing the technical challenges of modern AI workloads... » read more

Can Today’s Processor Architectures Be More Efficient?


For years, processors focused on performance, and that performance had little accountability to anything else. Performance still matters, but now it must be accountable to power. If small gains in performance result in disproportionate power gains, designers may need to discard such improvements in favor of more power-efficient ones. Although current architectures undergo a steady cadence of... » read more

Often Overlooked, PHYs Are Essential To High-Speed Data Movement


Over the past couple of decades, the semiconductor industry has evolved from a supporting role for traditional verticals like mobile, automotive, and PCs to a foundational role in those markets, as well as in AI factories and hyperscale data centers. Underlying this transformation is the physical layer (PHY), which has emerged as a critical enabler for data transfer and communications. The P... » read more

When Can I Buy A Chiplet?


One year ago, Semiconductor Engineering conducted its first roundtable to find out the true state of the industry for chiplets. At that event, it was stated that no chiplet had ever been reused in a design for which it was not initially intended. How much has changed over the past year? Returning from last year were Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology for Marvell; Letizia Giuliano, vice... » read more

Blog Review: July 16


Synopsys' Bradley Geden and Manoz Palaparthi explain the difference between functional signoff and RTL signoff and why increased SoC complexity means that verification flows must now capture both the intent and the integrity of a design before it can move forward. Cadence's Frank Ferro finds that LPDDR isn't just for mobile devices anymore, with the new LPDDR6 standard bringing increased ban... » read more

AI In Chip Design: Tight Control Required


Executive Outlook: Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts to talk about what's needed to effectively leverage AI, who benefits from it, and where software-defined hardware works best, with Bill Mullen, Ansys fellow; John Ferguson, senior director of product management at Siemens EDA; Chris Mueth, senior director of new markets and strategic initiatives at Keysight; Albert Ze... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


GlobalFoundries plans to acquire MIPS, adding RISC-V processor IP and PPA optimization software capabilities to its foundry offerings. MIPS will continue to operate as a standalone business within GF. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025. The EU rolled out new general-purpose AI rules this week to limit copyright infringement, protect public safety, and require transparency... » read more

Cache-Coherent Symmetric Multiprocessing With LX8 Controllers On HiFi DSPs


Overview This document motivates the need for a cache-coherent multicore, symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) with applications to embedded control and audio processing. It describes the current state of the art in the employment of multiple embedded processors and audio DSPs in an SoC, with a discussion of related problems that current designs face. This is followed by an introdu... » read more

AI Pushes High-End Mobile From SoCs To Multi-Die


Advanced packaging is becoming a key differentiator for the high end of the mobile phone market, enabling higher performance, more flexibility, and faster time to market than systems on chip. Monolithic SoCs likely will remain the technology of choice for low-end and midrange mobile devices because of their form factor, proven record, and lower cost. But multi-die assemblies provide more fle... » read more

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