Supply Chain Collaboration Key To Making Chip Industry More Sustainable


Coming in the wake of the COP27, the Smart and Green Manufacturing Summit at SEMICON Europa 2022 (Munich, 15-17 November) had a timely focus on the semiconductor industry’s contribution to meeting the United Nations’ target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, in an industry as large and valuable as semiconductors, social as well as environmental imp... » read more

DeepGBASS: Deep Guided Boundary-Aware Semantic Segmentation


Image semantic segmentation is ubiquitously used in scene understanding applications, such as AI Camera, which require high accuracy and efficiency. Deep learning has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. However, many of recent semantic segmentation works only consider class accuracy and ignore the accuracies at the boundaries between semantic classes. To improv... » read more

Design And Verification Methodologies Breaking Down


Tools, methodologies and flows that have been in place since the dawn of semiconductor design are breaking down, but this time there isn't a large pool of researchers coming up with potential solutions. The industry is on its own to formulate those ideas, and that will take a lot of cooperation between EDA companies, fabs, and designers, which has not been their strong point in the past. It ... » read more

Will Floating Point 8 Solve AI/ML Overhead?


While the media buzzes about the Turing Test-busting results of ChatGPT, engineers are focused on the hardware challenges of running large language models and other deep learning networks. High on the ML punch list is how to run models more efficiently using less power, especially in critical applications like self-driving vehicles where latency becomes a matter of life or death. AI already ... » read more

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

← Older posts Newer posts →