Is AI Sustainable? Five Ways To Reduce Its Carbon Footprint


Forget adding bunny ears to your selfie; AI has long since grown up and begun tackling tough, environmental problems. Its data-crunching superpowers make it ideal for everything from ocean monitoring to climate change prediction modeling. But training AI models requires vast amounts of energy, so do the benefits outweigh the environmental cost? In short, is AI sustainable? Sustainable AI: fact... » read more

Achieving Greater Accuracy In Real-Time Vision Processing With Transformers


Transformers, first proposed in a Google research paper in 2017, were initially designed for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, researchers applied transformers to vision applications and got interesting results. While previously, vision tasks had been dominated by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), transformers have proven surprisingly adaptable to vision tasks like image cl... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


SEMI , SEMI Europe and European Commission representatives, in consultation with semiconductor industry stakeholders, proposed initiatives to overcome the skills shortage in Europe’s microelectronics industry: Create an industry image campaign to raise public awareness on how technology is shaping the future, and how workers can establish careers in the semiconductor industry. Remove ... » read more

Heterogeneous Integration Issues And Developments


There are a slew of new developments in advanced packaging, from new materials, chiplets, and interconnect schemes, to challenges involving how to physically put chips in a package, metallization, thermal cycling, and parasitics in the interconnect path. Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries, talks about how this will change chip design and manufacturing, and how those changes are likely to unfol... » read more

Silent Data Corruption


Defects can creep into chip manufacturing from anywhere, but the problem is getting worse at advanced nodes and in advanced packages where reduced pin access can make testing much more difficult. Ira Leventhal, vice president of U.S. Applied Research and Technology at Advantest America, talks about what’s causing these so-called silent data errors, how to find them, and why it now requires ma... » read more

Variability Becoming More Problematic, More Diverse


Process variability is becoming more problematic as transistor density increases, both in planar chips and in heterogeneous advanced packages. On the basis of sheer numbers, there are many more things that can wrong. “If you have a chip with 50 billion transistors, then there are 50 places where a one-in-a-billion event can happen,” said Rob Aitken, a Synopsys fellow. And if Intel’s... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


The more than 1,400 attendees at this week’s IEDM, which celebrated the 75th anniversary of the transistor, were clearly focused on making the next 75 years of semiconductors even more remarkable than the last. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, STMicroelectronics, GlobalFoundries and imec announced breakthrough devices, materials, and even integration approaches. These included: Intel showcased adva... » read more

Edge AI And Chiplets


In the near future, more edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions will find their way into our lives. This will be especially true in the private sector for applications in the field of voice input and analysis of camera data, which will become well-established. These application areas require powerful AI hardware to be able to process the corresponding continuously accumulating data volumes... » read more

IC Stresses Affect Reliability At Advanced Nodes


Thermal-induced stress is now one of the leading causes of transistor failures, and it is becoming a top focus for chipmakers as more and different kinds of chips and materials are packaged together for safety- and mission-critical applications. The causes of stress are numerous. In heterogeneous packages, it can stem from multiple components composed of different materials. “These materia... » read more

AI At The IoT Edge Is Disrupting The Industrial Market


Artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge of the network is a cornerstone that will influence the future direction of the technology industry. If AI is an engine of change, then semiconductors are the oil driving the new age that is being defined by machine learning (ML), neural networks, 5G connectivity and the advent of blockchain, digital twins and the metaverse. Despite recent disruptions... » read more

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