Security Gaps In Open Source Hardware And AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security risks across multiple market segments with Helena Handschuh, security technologies fellow at Rambus; Mike Borza, principal security technologist for the Solutions Group at Synopsys; Steve Carlson, director of aerospace and defense solutions at Cadence; Alric Althoff, senior hardware security engineer at Tortuga Logic; and Joe Kiniry, princi... » read more

What Interested You In 2020


In business you are always told to follow the money, but for us it is more important to follow the readership. If we are not writing what you want to read, then we are missing the mark. I like to review the ones that have garnered the most attention, in part to see if that will influence what I write about for 2021, but also to find out where the industry is looking for the most help. As Sem... » read more

Using AI And Bugs To Find Other Bugs


Debug is starting to be rethought and retooled as chips become more complex and more tightly integrated into packages or other systems, particularly in safety- and mission-critical applications where life expectancy is significantly longer. Today, the predominant bug-finding approaches use the ubiquitous constrained random/coverage driven verification technology, or formal verification techn... » read more

Brute-Force Analysis Not Keeping Up With IC Complexity


Much of the current design and verification flow was built on brute force analysis, a simple and direct approach. But that approach rarely scales, and as designs become larger and the number of interdependencies increases, ensuring the design always operates within spec is becoming a monumental task. Unless design teams want to keep adding increasing amounts of margin, they have to locate th... » read more

Computational Software


Electronics technology is evolving rapidly, becoming pervasive in our lives. There are more smart phones in use than there are people on earth, driver assistance is now common in automobiles, commercial airplanes have increasingly sophisticated infotainment, and wearable health monitors exist for a plethora of missions. Every device is generating and communicating massive amounts of data, inclu... » read more

The Growing Market For Specialized Artificial Intelligence IP In SoCs


Over the past decade, designers have developed silicon technologies that run advanced deep learning mathematics fast enough to explore and implement artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as object identification, voice and facial recognition, and more. Machine vision applications, which are now often more accurate than a human, are one of the key functions driving new system-on-chip (S... » read more

Emerging Apps And Challenges For Packaging


Advanced packaging is playing a bigger role and becoming a more viable option to develop new system-level chip designs, but it also presents chipmakers with a confusing array of options and sometimes a hefty price tag. Automotive, servers, smartphones and other systems have embraced advanced packaging in one form or another. For other applications, it's overkill, and a simpler commodity pack... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — Data centers, cloud, 5G, edge In a move to improve data collection for IC manufacturing, PDF Solutions entered a definitive agreement to acquire Cimetrix Incorporated. Cimetrix makes connectivity products for smart manufacturing, which PDF Solutions will use in its Exensio product to facilitate moving IC manufacturing data from the factory floor to cloud-based analytics... » read more

Taking Advantage Of Outsourced Test Services


The business model in today’s competitive world of commerce has shifted over recent years to “services.” Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are prime success stories that have advanced the industry with business-enabling services. These economic productivity improvement services allow their customers to focus on product architecture, design and quick time to market. The service p... » read more

What’s Next In AI, Chips And Masks


Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about AI and Moore’s Law, lithography, and photomask technologies. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: In the eBeam Initiative’s recent Luminary Survey, the participants had some interesting observations about the outlook for the photomask market. What were those observations? Fujimur... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →