Semicon West Debrief


AI vs. energy. Quantum for everyone. Biofabrication of human organs on a mass scale. Slowing advancements from Moore’s law. In the midst of a market dip, optimism reigned as keynote and AI Design Forum speakers addressed both looming challenges and explosive market opportunities during July 9-10 presentations at SEMICON West 2019 in San Francisco. SEMICON West again proved to be a magnet f... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 14


Radiation thermometers The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a thermometer that can measure radiation within a few thousandths of a degree Celsius. The so-called Ambient-Radiation Thermometer (ART) from NIST is a new type of radiation thermometer, which measures infrared radiation (IR) given off by objects without touching them. Measuring 60 centimeters ... » read more

Driving AI, ML To New Levels On MCUs


One of the most dramatic impacts of technology of late has been the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning on small edge devices, the likes of which are forming the backbone of the Internet of Things. At first, this happened through sheer engineering willpower and innovation. But as the drive towards a world of a trillion connected devices accelerates, we must find wa... » read more

Redefining Expectations for Test


New and rapidly expanding applications, such as artificial intelligence and automotive, are increasing in design size and complexity. These evolving market segments require unprecedented levels of quality and long-term reliability, which has created a fundamental shift in both the importance and need for integration of advanced semiconductor test. Synopsys unveiled a new family of test products... » read more

How To Manage DFT For AI Chips


Semiconductor companies are racing to develop AI-specific chips to meet the rapidly growing compute requirements for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI chips from companies like Graphcore and Mythic are ASICs based on the novel, massively parallel architectures that maximize data processing capabilities for AI workloads. Others, like Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, are optimizing existing archite... » read more

March’19 Startup Funding: Money Springs Forth


Another month, another couple of billion-dollar rounds. Singapore-based Grab raised nearly $1.5 billion from the SoftBank Vision Fund, bringing its total private funding to more than $4.5 billion and valuing the company at around $14 billion. Grab has acquired Uber’s ride-hailing business in Southeast Asia and now competes chiefly with Go-Jek of Indonesia in Thailand and other emerging mar... » read more

Big Shift In Multi-Core Design


Hardware and software engineers have a long history of working independently of each other, but that insular behavior is changing in emerging areas such as AI, machine learning and automotive as the emphasis shifts to the system level. As these new markets consume more semiconductor content, they are having a big impact on the overall design process. The starting point in many of these desig... » read more

Utilizing More Data To Improve Chip Design


Just about every step of the IC tool flow generates some amount of data. But certain steps generate a mind-boggling amount of data, not all of which is of equal value. The challenge is figuring out what's important for which parts of the design flow. That determines what to extract and loop back to engineers, and when that needs to be done in order to improve the reliability of increasingly com... » read more

The Automation Of AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the role that EDA has in automating artificial intelligence and machine learning with Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics; Daniel Hansson, CEO of Verifyter; Harry Foster, chief scientist verification for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Manish Pandey, Synopsys fellow; and Raik Brinkmann, CEO ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Mar. 19


Explainable AI Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) propose a pair of algorithms to help determine how AI systems reach their conclusions. Explainable AI is an important step towards practical applications, argued Klaus-Robert Müller, Professor for Machine Learning at... » read more

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