Machine Learning Tools Accelerate Materials Discovery


Literature searches, simulations, and practical experiments have been part of the materials science toolkit for decades, but the last few years have seen an explosion of machine learning-driven software tools that promise to accelerate all three. Many of the challenges facing the semiconductor manufacturing industry are fundamentally materials science problems. What metal has the lowest resi... » read more

The Thermal Trap: How Dielectrics Limit Device Performance


The spread of artificial intelligence is forcing an uncomfortable truth on semiconductor manufacturing. Thin films, which are essential for isolating signals and insulating different components and metal layers, are becoming heat traps as physical dimensions continue to shrink in chips used inside AI data centers. That, in turn, is limiting how fast these chips can process data and increasing t... » read more

The Future For Formal Verification


Experts at the table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss possible future directions for formal verification technology with Ashish Darbari, CEO for Axiomise; Jin Zhang, product management group director for the Verification Group at Cadence; Sean Safarpour, executive director for R&D at Synopsys; and Jeremy Levitt, principal engineer for Digital Verification Technology at Siemen... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 19


Cadence's Mamta Rana explores how Forward Error Correction in PCIe 6.0 is key to its 64.0 GT/s per lane bandwidth by enabling the receiver to detect and correct errors without retransmissions or protocol-level recovery by adding redundant information to transmitted data. Siemens' Dave Rich shares a paper from DVCon 1992 that introduced a new RTL modeling construct to Verilog, eventually know... » read more

Edge AI Is Starting To Transform Industrial IoT


A slew of wireless and increasingly multi-modal sensors is being targeted at the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), setting the stage for significant improvements in efficiency, higher yield, and reduced downtime. Wired IIoT devices, such as smart energy meters and breakers, industrial network gateways, and environmental sensors already are well established in factory settings. They have ... » read more

Noise: A Chip Killer


Noise has always been important to communications experts, but it's quickly becoming an issue that every semiconductor designer has to contend with. Some chips already have been compromised. Noise can be defined as any deviation from the ideal that can impact intended functionality. When it comes to semiconductors, that could mean the ability to reliably extract a signal value at the intende... » read more

Power Integrity And Voltage Issues Get Harder To Detect And Solve


Voltage and power integrity are becoming increasingly critical and challenging for chip designers and architects, regardless of which process technology they are using or which market they are targeting. An explosion of features vying unevenly for current is increasing the number of constraints and possible interactions that engineers need to sort through to ensure reliability. These include... » read more

Predictable Design Optimization And Closure With Adaptive Scenario Compression


Modern semiconductor chip design faces growing complexity due to numerous timing scenarios driven by varying operating conditions and physical effects. This complexity is especially pronounced in mobile and automotive chips, which require optimization across diverse performance and reliability demands. Designers currently focus on a limited subset of scenarios to manage computational load, but ... » read more

Multiple AI Scale-Up Options Emerge


Artificial intelligence (AI) workloads are very different from those traditionally run inside of data centers, and while the current infrastructure can accommodate those needs, there is a constant demand for higher performance and better power efficiency. It can take months to train a large language model, even with a huge number of processing elements. Typically this involves commandeering ... » read more

The Future Of Digital Engineering In The Age Of AI


Digital engineering gives innovators creative agency to test the limits of their ideas in a virtual environment. It is in this convergence of digital technologies, data-driven models, and advanced simulations where new designs are born at unprecedented levels of speed and accuracy. Adding artificial intelligence (AI) into the mix further accelerates innovation by unlocking opportunities to a... » read more

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