Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

Sweeping Changes For Leading-Edge Chip Architectures


Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power, signaling a fundamental shift from manufacturing-driven designs to those driven by semiconductor architects. In the past, most chips contained one or two leading-edge technologies, mostly to keep pace with the expected improvements i... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman Global semiconductor equipment billings dipped 2% year-over-year to US$25.8 billion in Q2, and slipped 4% compared with Q1, according to SEMI. Similarly, the top 10 semiconductor foundries reported a 1.1% quarterly-over-quarter revenue decline in Q2. A rebound is anticipated in Q3, according to TrendForce. Synopsys extended its AI-driven EDA ... » read more

Performance & Efficiency Cores For Servers


HotChips 2023 was held August 27-29, 2023 at Stanford University in California and was the first in-person version of the conference in 4 years. The conference was held in a hybrid format that had over 500 participants in-person and over 1,000 attending virtually online. Topics covered a broad range of advancements in computing, connectivity, and computer architecture. Both AMD and Intel gav... » read more

Transient Execution Attacks That Leaks Arbitrary Kernel Memory (ETH Zurich)


A technical paper titled “Inception: Exposing New Attack Surfaces with Training in Transient Execution” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract: "To protect against transient control-flow hijacks, software relies on a secure state of microarchitectural buffers that are involved in branching decisions. To achieve this secure state, hardware and software mitigations restrict or... » read more

Modeling and Testing Microarchitectural Leakage of CPU Exceptions (Microsoft, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)


A new technical paper titled "Speculation at Fault: Modeling and Testing Microarchitectural Leakage of CPU Exceptions" was published by researchers at Microsoft and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This paper was included at the recent 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. Abstract: "Microarchitectural leakage models provide effective tools to prevent vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown vi... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys’ board of directors appointed Sassine Ghazi as president and chief executive officer effective on Jan. 1, 2024. Ghazi, who is currently the COO, will succeed Aart de Geus, co-founder, chair, and CEO of Synopsys, who will then become the executive chair of board of directors. IBM Research introduced  an energy-efficient mixed-signal analog AI chip for DNN inferencing and demonstra... » read more

Tradeoffs Between On-Premise And On-Cloud Design


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down discuss how and why companies are dividing up work on-premise and in the cloud, and what to watch out for, with Philip Steinke, fellow, CAD infrastructure and physical design at AMD; Mahesh Turaga, vice president of business development for cloud at Cadence Design Systems; Richard Ho, vice president hardware engineering at Lightmatter; Cr... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Intel issued an advisory of a potential security vulnerability in some of its processors. The company recommends updating to the latest firmware version. NVIDIA unveiled its GH200 Grace Hopper platform, based on 144 Arm Neoverse cores and 282GB of HBM3e memory. Meanwhile, Chinese internet companies including Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba ordered about $5 billion worth of A800 proces... » read more

Chiplets: Deep Dive Into Designing, Manufacturing, And Testing


Chiplets are a disruptive technology. They change the way chips are designed, manufactured, tested, packaged, as well as the underlying business relationships and fundamentals. But they also open the door to vast new opportunities for existing chipmakers and startups to create highly customized components and systems for specific use cases and market segments. This LEGO-like approach sounds ... » read more

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