Chip Industry Week In Review


GlobalFoundries will create a new center for advanced packaging and testing of U.S.-made essential chips within its New York manufacturing facility. A flurry of announcements on advanced semiconductors and AI rolled out this week as U.S. President Biden wrapped up his term: The Biden-Harris Administration released an Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion to strengthen ... » read more

How Ultra Ethernet And UALink Enable High-Performance, Scalable AI Networks


By Ron Lowman and Jon Ames AI workloads are significantly driving innovation in the interface IP market. The exponential increase in AI model parameters, doubling approximately every 4-6 months, stands in stark contrast to the slower pace of hardware advancements dictated by Moore's Law, which follows an 18-month cycle. This discrepancy demands hardware innovations to support AI workloads, c... » read more

Power Budgets Optimized By Managing Glitch Power


“Waste not, want not,” says the old adage, and in general, that’s good advice to live by. But in the realm of chip design, wasting power is a fact of physics. Glitch power – power that gets expended due to delays in gates and/or wires – can account for up to 40% of the power budget in advanced applications like data center servers. Even in less high-powered circuits, such as those fou... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities


The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

What’s The Best Way To Sell An Inference Engine?


The burgeoning AI market has seen innumerable startups funded on the strength of their ideas about building faster, lower-power, and/or lower-cost AI inference engines. Part of the go-to-market dynamic has involved deciding whether to offer a chip or IP — with some newcomers pivoting between chip and IP implementations of their ideas. The fact that some companies choose to sell chips while... » read more

Achieving Successful Timing, Power, And Physical Signoff For Multi-Die Designs


Multi-die designs using 2.5D and 3D technologies are increasingly important for a wide range of electronics applications, including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and mobile. The multi-die architecture enables designers to mix dies from different foundries and technology nodes, including existing dies from previous projects. The resulting density and... » read more

AI Won’t Replace Subject Matter Experts


Experts at The Table: The emergence of LLMs and other forms of AI has sent ripples through a number of industries, raising fears that many jobs could be on the chopping block, to be replaced by automation. Whether that’s the case in semiconductors, where machine learning has become an integral part of the design process, remains to be seen. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of e... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 15


Siemens EDA's Stephen V. Chavez argues that the placement of decoupling capacitors on a PCB can make or break a design's power delivery system and provides some best practices and design considerations, such as ensuring even distribution on a board rather than crowding them around chips. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis predicts that in 2025, AI agents will begin collaborating with other AI age... » read more

DFT At The Leading Edge


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the rapidly changing landscape of design for testability (DFT), focusing on the impact of advancements in fault models, high-speed interfaces, and lifecycle data analytics, with Jeorge Hurtarte, senior director of product marketing in the Semiconductor Test Group at Teradyne; Sri Ganta, director of test products at Synopsys; D... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global semiconductor sales hit $57.8 billion in November 2024, an increase of 20.7% compared to the same month last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In U.S. government news: The U.S. Department of Commerce finalized up to $325 million in CHIPS Act funding for Hemlock Semiconductor, which will support construction of a new semiconductor-grade polysilicon manufac... » read more

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