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

IC Integrity Of Edge-Computing Processors: Meeting The Demands Of AI


If you ask most people, they would say that we’re living in an age of artificial intelligence (AI). But the reality is that we’re just getting started. The age of artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. So many of aspects of our lives involve technology but we’re still having to feed that technology or manually operate that technology in order get the results we want. Autonomous ... » read more

The Expanding Universe Of MIPI Applications


It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when mobile phones had no cameras and displays were tiny monochrome LCDs capable of displaying a phone number and not much more. The iconic Nokia 3310 announced Sept. 1, 2000, had an 84 x 48 pixel monochrome display and went on to sell 126 million units worldwide. You may still have one in your junk drawer. By the time of the original iPhone... » read more

Difficult Memory Choices In AI Systems


The number of memory choices and architectures is exploding, driven by the rapid evolution in AI and machine learning chips being designed for a wide range of very different end markets and systems. Models for some of these systems can range in size from 10 billion to 100 billion parameters, and they can vary greatly from one chip or application to the next. Neural network training and infer... » read more

Artificial Intelligence For Sustainable And Energy Efficient Buildings


According to the goals of Europe’s green deal missions, the continent strives for becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Since buildings are a major contributor to the overall consumption of energy, improving their energy efficiency can be a key to a more sustainable and greener Europe. On the way towards zero-emission buildings, several challenges have to be met: In modern energy systems, several ... » read more

The Benefits Of Using Embedded Sensing Fabrics In AI Devices


AI chips, regardless of the application, are not regular ASICs and tend to be very large, this essentially means that AI chips are reaching the reticle limits in-terms of their size. They are also usually dominated by an array of regular structures and this helps to mitigate yield issues by building in tolerance to defect density due to the sheer number of processor blocks. The reason behind... » read more

Faster Inferencing At The Edge


Cheng Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, talks about inferencing at the edge, what are some of the main considerations in designing and choosing an inferencing chip, why programmability and modularity are important, and how hardware-software co-design with algorithms can improve performance and power. » read more

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