Challenges In RF Design


Designing highly integrated components for radio frequency applications poses special challenges for system engineers, designers and the commissioning engineers. The boundary between chip, package and board is increasingly vanishing on modern components. It is growing more common for parts of the functionality to be moved to the package or even the board. In some cases, the requirements have be... » read more

Low-Power Always-On Circuits


Some circuits are always on. A smart phone wakes up when it senses a user, and a smart speaker responds to keywords. The challenge is to make sure these devices don’t consume a lot of power while the rest of a device is powered down, that it remains secure, and that it can quickly wake up whatever other functions are needed. All of this requires a significant amount of engineering work. Amol ... » read more

The Importance Of Aging Simulation In IC Design


Electronics reliability has been an important quality criterion in the automotive sector and in industrial automation for years. Electronics in this sector have to achieve product lifetimes of 10+ years under partially harsh environmental conditions. But the reliability of electronics is also becoming more important in other fields. For example, end customers now keep consumer products longer, ... » read more

Sensor Fusion Everywhere


How do you distinguish between background noise and the sound of an intruder breaking glass? David Jones, head of marketing and business development for intuitive sensing solutions at Infineon, looks at what types of sensors are being developed, what happens when different sensors are combined, what those sensors are being used for today, and what they will be used for in the future. » read more

In-Chip Sensing And PVT Monitoring: Not Just An Insurance Policy


You wouldn’t drive an expensive car without insurance or take a flight in an aircraft without performing instrument and control surface checks. So why would you take the risk of designing a multi-million dollar advanced node semiconductor device without making sure you are aware of, and able to manage, the dynamic conditions that had the potential to make or break a silicon product? Advanced... » read more

Aging Analysis Common Model Interface Gains Momentum


By Greg Curtis, Ahmed Ramadan, Ninad Pimparkar, and Jung-Suk Goo In February 2019, Siemens EDA wrote an article1 entitled “The Time Is Now for a Common Model Interface”. Since that time, we have continued to see increasing demand for aging analysis, not only in the traditional automotive space, but also in other areas of technology design, such as mobile communication and IoT application... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 23


Detecting early damage in power electronics Researchers at Osaka University to detect early damage in power electronics. The team used acoustic emission analysis to monitor in real time the propagation of cracks in a silicon carbide Schottsky diode during power cycling tests. During the power cycling test, the researchers mimicked repeatedly turning the device on and off, to monitor the res... » read more

Performance and Power Tradeoffs At 7/5nm


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power optimization with Oliver King, CTO at Moortec; João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys; Dino Toffolon, senior vice president of engineering at Synopsys; Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Kiran Burli, senior director of marketing for Arm's Physical Design Group; Kam Kittrell, senior product management group d... » read more

The Quest To Make 5G Systems Reliable


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How do we measure the reli... » read more

Getting Particular About Partitioning


Partitioning could well be one of the most important and pervasive trends since the invention of computers. It has been around for almost as long, too. The idea dates back at least as far back as the Manhattan Project during World War II, when computations were wrapped within computations. It continued from there with what we know as time-sharing, which rather crudely partitioned access by p... » read more

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