A graph placement methodology for fast chip design


Abstract "Chip floorplanning is the engineering task of designing the physical layout of a computer chip. Despite five decades of research1, chip floorplanning has defied automation, requiring months of intense effort by physical design engineers to produce manufacturable layouts. Here we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to chip floorplanning. In under six hours, our method autom... » read more

Enablers And Barriers For Connecting Diverse Data


More data is being collected at every step of the manufacturing process, raising the possibility of combining data in new ways to solve engineering problems. But this is far from simple, and combining results is not always possible. The semiconductor industry’s thirst for data has created oceans of it from the manufacturing process. In addition, semiconductor designs large and small now ha... » read more

Solving Real World AI Productization Challenges With Adaptive Computing


The field of artificial intelligence (AI) moves swiftly, with the pace of innovation only accelerating. While the software industry has been successful in deploying AI in production, the hardware industry – including automotive, industrial, and smart retail – is still in its infancy in terms of AI productization. Major gaps still exist that hinder AI algorithm proof-of-concepts (PoC) from b... » read more

Getting Better Edge Performance & Efficiency From Acceleration-Aware ML Model Design


The advent of machine learning techniques has benefited greatly from the use of acceleration technology such as GPUs, TPUs and FPGAs. Indeed, without the use of acceleration technology, it’s likely that machine learning would have remained in the province of academia and not had the impact that it is having in our world today. Clearly, machine learning has become an important tool for solving... » read more

Easier And Faster Ways To Train AI


Training an AI model takes an extraordinary amount of effort and data. Leveraging existing training can save time and money, accelerating the release of new products that use the model. But there are a few ways this can be done, most notably through transfer and incremental learning, and each of them has its applications and tradeoffs. Transfer learning and incremental learning both take pre... » read more

What’s Missing For Designing Chips At The System Level


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

Six Things We Might Need For Pervasive Computing


There is little doubt that digital technology will become more pervasive than it is even now in the coming decades. Organizations like the Exponential Group argue that digital should be the first step in sustainability, estimating that hardware and software could help reduce emissions by 15% by 2030 and beyond by helping fine-tune buildings, factories, and other environments. Cars—already ... » read more

HBM3: Big Impact On Chip Design


An insatiable demand for bandwidth in everything from high-performance computing to AI training, gaming, and automotive applications is fueling the development of the next generation of high-bandwidth memory. HBM3 will bring a 2X bump in bandwidth and capacity per stack, as well as some other benefits. What was once considered a "slow and wide" memory technology to reduce signal traffic dela... » read more

Competing Auto Sensor Fusion Approaches


As today’s internal-combustion engines are replaced by electric/electronic vehicles, mechanical-system sensors will be supplanted by numerous electronic sensors both for efficient operation and for achieving various levels of autonomy. Some of these new sensors will operate alone, but many prominent ones will need their outputs combined — or “fused” — with the outputs of other sensor... » read more

HBM3 Memory: Break Through To Greater Bandwidth


AI/ML’s demands for greater bandwidth are insatiable driving rapid improvements in every aspect of computing hardware and software. HBM memory is the ideal solution for the high bandwidth requirements of AI/ML training, but it entails additional design considerations given its 2.5D architecture. Now we’re on the verge of a new generation of HBM that will raise memory and capacity to new hei... » read more

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