Early STEM Education Key To Growing Future Chip Workforce


A key factor in building a domestic workforce for the chip industry is attracting kids to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects at a younger age. That way they are more likely to follow through and attain the skills and degrees needed to enter the semiconductor job market. Industry and government are partnering with schools and community organizations to address the chal... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan. The U.S. government released a 61-page report, titled "National Strategy on Microelectronics Research,” by the Subcommittee On Microelectronics Leadership. It provides a framework for government, industry, academia, and international allies to address four major goals. Synopsys  acquired Intrinsic ID, which develops physical unclonable func... » read more

Blog Review: March 20


Synopsys' Kiran Vittal delves into AI chips, including the expansion of chip design beyond traditional semiconductor companies, adoption of RISC-V, and the use of formal equivalence checking to verify complex AI datapaths. Siemens' Patrick McGoff points to a survey that suggests projects deploying design for manufacturing within a PCB design flow are more likely to be completed on-time, on-q... » read more

Optimizing Energy At The System Level


Power is a ubiquitous concern, and it is impossible to optimize a system's energy consumption without considering the system as a whole. Tremendous strides have been made in the optimization of a hardware implementation, but that is no longer enough. The complete system must be optimized. There are far reaching implications to this, some of which are driving the path toward domain-specific c... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. Europe's semiconductor footprint is growing in areas that previously had little association with chips. Silicon Box plans to build a panel-level foundry in northern Italy, funded in part by the Italian government. The deal is worth around €3.2 billion ($3.6B). In addition, imec will establish a specialized 300mm chip technology pilot line in M... » read more

The Rising Price Of Power In Chips


Power is everything when it comes to processing and storing data, and much of it isn't good. Power-related issues, particularly heat, dominate chip and system designs today, and those issues are widening and multiplying. Transistor density has reached a point where these tiny digital switches are generating more heat than can be removed through traditional means. That may sound manageable e... » read more

Easing Automotive Software Migration


The automotive industry is on the cusp of seismic change. Multiple trends are occurring simultaneously that are impacting the entire supply chain of the industry. Software-defined vehicles (SDVs), autonomy and electrification are motivating automotive OEMs to holistically rethink the vehicle’s software and hardware development cycles. To better manage multiple compute elements and increasi... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 13


Cadence's Geeta Arora explains the Address Translation Service in PCIe 6.0, which allows an I/O device to perform its own virtual to physical address translations without relying on the host's CPU to reduce latency and improve overall system performance. Synopsys' John Swanson, Jon Ames, Priyank Shukla, and Varun Agrawal highlight the upcoming 1.6T iteration of the Ethernet standard and the ... » read more

Workload Trace Generation


The intended audience for this document is a performance engineer preparing traces for performance prediction on new Arm hardware. It is expected that the reader understands the basic concepts of performance engineering such as: • Workload characterization • Identifying key aspects of a workload • Understanding how Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) events correlate to a workload Click her... » read more

Securing DRAM Against Evolving Rowhammer Threats


Advanced process nodes and higher silicon densities are heightening DRAM's susceptibility to Rowhammer attacks, as reduced cell spacing significantly decreases the hammer count needed for bit flips. Rowhammer exploits DRAM’s single-capacitor-per-bit design to trigger bit flips in adjacent cells through repeated memory row accesses. This vulnerability allows attackers to manipulate data, re... » read more

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