Big Trouble At 3nm


As chipmakers begin to ramp up 10nm/7nm technologies in the market, vendors are also gearing up for the development of a next-generation transistor type at 3nm. Some have announced specific plans at 3nm, but the transition to this node is expected to be a long and bumpy one, filled with a slew of technical and cost challenges. For example, the design cost for a 3nm chip could exceed an eye-p... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Tools/Chips Synopsys rolled out a new release of its automotive exterior lighting design and analysis software. The tool calculations and generates images for multiple viewing directions and different lighting conditions. Lighting on vehicles has become far more complex than just shining a beam on the road. The latest technology can adapt to road conditions, other cars, and help illuminate the... » read more

Blazing-Fast Performance


When it comes to raw performance, there's nothing like a supercomputer. Until recently, though, most of this was simply bragging rights about whose supercomputer was faster. A trillion calculations (petaflop), more or less, doesn't mean that much outside of scientific circles. What's changing is that companies and governments now can utilize these blazing fast machines across a wider swath o... » read more

Blog Review: June 13


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at what the flaws in OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption means for the IoT and warns that the problems of patching such devices could lead to an increasing chance of security failures. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a peek at Imec's roadmap to see what the path to 3nm looks like, how nanosheets fit in, and why design and system technology co-optimization is necessar... » read more

New Transistor Types Vs. Packaging


Plans are being formulated for the rollout of multiple types of gate-all-around FETs and literally dozens of advanced packaging options. The question now is which ones will achieve critical mass, because there aren't enough chips in the world to support all of them profitably. FinFETs, which were first introduced by Intel at 22nm, are running out of steam. While they will survive 10/7nm, and... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance CyberInt raised $18 million in new funding led by Viola Growth and including existing investors. The company provides cybersecurity detection and response services. CyberInt has offices in Israel, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Panama. San Diego-based Kneron, which provides artificial intelligence technology for edge devices, received $18 million in Series A1 funding l... » read more

IBM Takes AI In Different Directions


Jeff Welser, vice president and lab director at IBM Research Almaden, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss what's changing in artificial intelligence and what challenges still remain. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What's changing in AI and why? Welser: The most interesting thing in AI right now is that we've moved from narrow AI, where we've proven you... » read more

Integrating Memristors For Neuromorphic Computing


Much of the current research on neuromorphic computing focuses on the use of non-volatile memory arrays as a compute-in-memory component for artificial neural networks (ANNs). By using Ohm’s Law to apply stored weights to incoming signals, and Kirchoff’s Laws to sum up the results, memristor arrays can accelerate the many multiply-accumulate steps in ANN algorithms. ANNs are being dep... » read more

Designing Hardware For Security


By Ed Sperling and Kevin Fogarty Cyber criminals are beginning to target weaknesses in hardware to take control of devices, rather than using the hardware as a stepping stone to access to the software. This shift underscores a significant increase in the sophistication of the attackers, as evidenced by the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown by Google Project Zero in 2017 (made public in Ja... » read more

Challenges At The Edge


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling Edge computing is inching toward the mainstream as the tech industry begins grappling with the fact that far too much data will be generated by sensors to send everything back to the cloud for processing. The initial idea behind the IoT/IIoT, as well as other connected devices, was that simple sensors would relay raw data to the cloud for processing throug... » read more

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