The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys revealed a power analysis solution for early SoC design as well as signoff-accurate power and reliability closure. PrimePower has reliability as a major focus, expanding power and reliability signoff and ECO closure capabilities from physical awareness to cell electromigration effects. Supported power types include peak power, average power, clock network power, leakage power, a... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Marvell Technology Group priced $500 million in senior notes due in 2023 and $500 million in senior notes due in 2028. The chip company will use net proceeds from the debt offering, cash on hand, and borrowings under a new term loan facility to fund the cash consideration and other amounts payable for Marvell’s proposed $6 billion acquisition of Cavium. The companies have expected to... » read more

What’s Next In R&D?


Luc Van den hove, president and chief executive of Imec, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss R&D challenges and what’s next in the arena. The Belgium R&D organization is working on AI, DNA storage, EUV, semiconductors and other technologies. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Moore’s Law is slowing down. And it is becoming more expensive to move fr... » read more

Combining Human Intelligence And Smart Machines


By Nancy Greco, Dave Mayewski, James Moyne, Paul Werbaneth The spacecraft Discovery and its HAL 9000 computer system had a digital twin. Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film “2001: A Space Odyssey” had its theatrical release 50 years ago this April. “2001” isn’t just a great science fiction film. Rather, it’s a great work of cinema overall, across any category. (The American Film... » read more

Tech Talk: Connected Intelligence


Gary Patton, CTO at GlobalFoundries, talks about computing at the edge, the slowdown in scaling, and why new materials and packaging approaches will be essential in the future. https://youtu.be/Zbz0R_yFFrQ » read more

Can AI Alter The Burgeoning Design Cost Trend?


Everyone in the semiconductor design arena has experienced or at least observed the impact of increasing costs for complex SoC silicon. Semico’s recently released report entitled "Silicon and Software Design Cost Analysis" reveals the cost associated with a first time design effort for a high-end, advanced performance multicore SoC using 7nm process technology can top $195M for both the silic... » read more

Defining Edge Memory Requirements


Defining edge computing memory requirements is a growing problem for chipmakers vying for a piece of this market, because it varies by platform, by application, and even by use case. Edge computing plays a role in artificial intelligence, automotive, IoT, data centers, as well as wearables, and each has significantly different memory requirements. So it's important to have memory requirement... » read more

Can Machine Learning Chips Help Develop Better Tools With Machine Learning?


As we continue to be bombarded with AI- and machine learning-themed presentations at industry conferences, an ex-colleague told me that he is sick of seeing an outline of the human head with a processor in place of the brain. If you are a chip architect trying to build one of these data-centric architecture chips for machine learning or AI (as opposed to the compute-centric chips, which you pro... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A MIPS has reportedly been acquired again, this time by AI startup Wave Computing. Wave focuses on data center-based neural network training using its parallel dataflow processing architecture. In March, the company signed on to use 64-bit multi-threaded processor cores from MIPS in future projects. Previously, MIPS was owned by Tallwood Venture Capital, which acquired MIPS from Imaginat... » read more

The Growing Materials Challenge


By Katherine Derbyshire & Ed Sperling Materials have emerged as a growing challenge across the semiconductor supply chain, as chips continue to scale, or as they are utilized in new devices such as sensors for AI or machine learning systems. Engineered materials are no longer optional at advanced nodes. They are now a requirement, and the amount of new material content in chips contin... » read more

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