AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups


Using AI in EDA is reinvigorating the whole tools industry, prompting established players to upgrade their tool offerings with AI/ML features, while drawing in startups trying to carve out differentiated approaches to fill unaddressed gaps with new tools and methodologies. Today’s new generation of entrepreneurs is comprised of both young post-grads with innovative ideas and industry veter... » read more

Floor-Planning Evolves Into The Chiplet Era


3D-ICs and heterogeneous chiplets will require significant changes in physical layout tools, where the placement of chiplets and routing of signals can have a big impact on overall system performance and reliability. EDA vendors are well aware of the issues and working on solutions. Top on the list of challenges for 3D-ICs is thermal dissipation. Logic typically generates the most heat, and ... » read more

Digital Twins Gaining Traction In Complex Designs


The integration of heterogeneous chiplets into an advanced package, coupled with the increasing digitalization of multiple industry segments, is pushing digital twins to the forefront of design. The challenge in these complex assemblies is figuring out the potential tradeoffs between different chiplets, different assembly approaches, and to be able to do it quickly enough to still hit market... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Samsung unveiled its latest 2nm and 4nm process nodes, plus its AI solutions during the Samsung Foundry Forum. The company also introduced an aggressive roadmap for the next few years that includes 3D-ICs with logic-on-logic, starting in 2025; custom HBM with built-in logic; backside power delivery on 2nm technology in 2027; and co-packaged optics. In presentations at the event, the company als... » read more

New Approaches Needed For Power Management


Power is becoming a bigger concern as the amount of data being processed continues to grow, forcing chipmakers and systems companies to rethink compute architectures from the end point all the way to the data center. There is no simple fix to this problem. More data is being collected, moved, and processed, requiring more power at every step, and more attention to physical effects such as he... » read more

AI For Data Management


Data management is becoming a significant new challenge for the chip industry, as well as a brand new opportunity, as the amount of data collected at every step of design through manufacturing continues to grow. Exacerbating the problem is the rising complexity of designs, many of which are highly customized and domain-specific at the leading edge, as well as increasing demands for reliabili... » read more

Running More Efficient AI/ML Code With Neuromorphic Engines


Neuromorphic engineering is finally getting closer to market reality, propelled by the AI/ML-driven need for low-power, high-performance solutions. Whether current initiatives result in true neuromorphic devices, or whether devices will be inspired by neuromorphic concepts, remains to be seen. But academic and industry researchers continue to experiment in the hopes of achieving significant ... » read more

Fundamental Issues In Computer Vision Still Unresolved


Given computer vision’s place as the cornerstone of an increasing number of applications from ADAS to medical diagnosis and robotics, it is critical that its weak points be mitigated, such as the ability to identify corner cases or if algorithms are trained on shallow datasets. While well-known bloopers are often the result of human decisions, there are also fundamental technical issues that ... » read more

Dealing With AI/ML Uncertainty


Despite their widespread popularity, large language models (LLMs) have several well-known design issues, the most notorious being hallucinations, in which an LLM tries to pass off its statistics-based concoctions as real-world facts. Hallucinations are examples of a fundamental, underlying issue with LLMs. The inner workings of LLMs, as well as other deep neural nets (DNNs), are only partly kno... » read more

Linear Drive Optics May Reduce Data Latency


Optical and electrical are starting to cross paths at a much deeper level, particularly with the growing focus on 3D-ICs and AI/ML training in data centers, driving changes both in how chips are designed and how these very different technologies are integrated together. At the root of this shift are the power and performance demands of AI/ML. It can now take several buildings of a data cente... » read more

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