Top Tech Talks Of 2018


2018 shaped up to be a year of transition and inflection, sometimes in the same design. There were new opportunities in automotive, continued difficulties in scaling, and an explosion in AI and machine learning everywhere. Traffic numbers on stories give a snapshot of the most current trends, but with videos those trends are even more apparent because of the time invested in watching those v... » read more

It’s All About The Data


The entire tech industry has changed in several fundamental ways over the past year due to the massive growth in data. Individually, those changes are significant. Taken together, those changes will have a massive impact on the chip industry for the foreseeable future. The obvious shift is the infusion of AI (and its subcategories, machine learning and deep learning) into different markets. ... » read more

Top Stories For 2018


Each year, I look back to see what articles people like to read. The first thing that has amazed me each year at Semiconductor Engineering is that what should be a strong bias towards articles published early in the year never seems to play out. The same is true this year. More than half of the top articles were published after July. The second thing that remains constant is that people love... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In 2018


What surprised the industry in 2018?  While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon. As 2018 comes to a close, most companies are pretty happy with the way everything turned out. Business has been booming, new product categories developing, and profits are meeting or beating market expectations. "2018 was indeed a... » read more

Security, Scaling and Power


If anyone has doubts about the slowdown and increasing irrelevance of Moore's Law, Intel's official unveiling of its advanced packaging strategy should leave little doubt. Inertia has ended and the roadmap is being rewritten. Intel's discussion of advanced packaging is nothing new. The company has been public about its intentions for years, and started dropping hints back when Pat Gelsinger ... » read more

FPGA Graduates To First-Tier Status


Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about fundamental shifts in compute architectures and why AI, machine learning and various vertical applications are driving demand for discrete and embedded FPGAs. SE: What’s changing in the FPGA market? Blake: Our big focus is developing the next-generation architecture. We started this projec... » read more

Looking Beyond The CPU


CPUs no longer deliver the same kind of of performance improvements as in the past, raising questions across the industry about what comes next. The growth in processing power delivered by a single CPU core began stalling out at the beginning of the decade, when power-related issues such as heat and noise forced processor companies to add more cores rather than pushing up the clock frequency... » read more

Getting Down To Business On Chiplets


Government agencies, industry groups and individual companies are beginning to rally around various chiplet models, setting the stage for complex chips that are quicker and cheaper to build using standardized interfaces and components. The idea of putting together different modules like LEGOs has been talked about for the better part of a decade. So far, only Marvell has used this concept co... » read more

Design For Advanced Packaging


Advanced packaging techniques are viewed as either a replacement for Moore's Law scaling, or a way of augmenting it. But there is a big gap between the extensive work done to prove these devices can be manufactured with sufficient yield and the amount of attention being paid to the demands advanced packaging has on the design and verification flows. Not all advanced packaging places the same... » read more

The Process Design Kit: Protecting Design Know-How


Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each company. In these days, when designs contained hundreds of transistors, companies modeled each feature in an IC at a first principles level, meaning each transistor or fundamental device was analyzed an... » read more

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