Circuit Design For Industry 4.0


By Björn Zeugmann and Olaf Enge-Rosenblatt The digitalization of industry is progressing in leaps and bounds, albeit not at the same speed everywhere. In many industries, processes can be digitalized well to very well — for example, because electronic control systems can be retrofitted from analog to digital relatively easily. In some cases, new industries emerge only because processes ha... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


TEL announced plans to build a ¥2.2 billion ($168.2 million) production and logistics center at its Tohoku Office to increase capacity. Construction of the 57,000m² facility, which will be used for manufacturing thermal processing and single-wafer deposition systems, is slated to start in spring 2024, and expected to be completed in fall 2025. Toshiba's board voted in favor of a 2 trillio... » read more

FPGAs: Automated Framework For Architecture-Space Exploration of Approximate Accelerators


A technical paper titled "autoXFPGAs: An End-to-End Automated Exploration Framework for Approximate Accelerators in FPGA-Based Systems" was published (preprint) by researchers at TU Wien, Brno University of Technology, and NYUAD. Abstract "Generation and exploration of approximate circuits and accelerators has been a prominent research domain exploring energy-efficiency and/or performance... » read more

Neural Architecture & Hardware Accelerator Co-Design Framework (Princeton/ Stanford)


A new technical paper titled "CODEBench: A Neural Architecture and Hardware Accelerator Co-Design Framework" was published by researchers at Princeton University and Stanford University. "Recently, automated co-design of machine learning (ML) models and accelerator architectures has attracted significant attention from both the industry and academia. However, most co-design frameworks either... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Redefines Custom ASICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss bespoke silicon and what's driving that customization with Kam Kittrell, vice president of product management in the Digital & Signoff group at Cadence; Rupert Baines, chief marketing officer at Codasip; Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas; Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus; Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of Siemens... » read more

Design of a Mixed-signal ASIC for the front-end electronics of ionisation chambers


New technical paper titled "An Ultra Low Current Measurement Mixed-Signal ASIC for Radiation Monitoring Using Ionisation Chambers," by researchers at CERN. Abstract "Measurement of total ionizing dose in a radiation field is efficiently carried out by ionisation chambers. The paper details the design of a mixed-signal ASIC for the front-end electronics of ionisation chambers. A single c... » read more

An Event-Driven and Fully Synthesizable Architecture for Spiking Neural Networks


Abstract:  "The development of brain-inspired neuromorphic computing architectures as a paradigm for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the edge is a candidate solution that can meet strict energy and cost reduction constraints in the Internet of Things (IoT) application areas. Toward this goal, we present μBrain: the first digital yet fully event-driven without clock architecture, with co-lo... » read more

Dynamically Reconfiguring Logic


Dynamic reconfiguration of semiconductor logic has been possible for years, but it never caught on commercially. Cheng Wang, co-founder and senior vice president of software and engineering at Flex Logix, explains why this capability has been so difficult to utilize, what’s changed, how a soft logic layer can be used to control when to read, compute, steer, and write data back to memory, and ... » read more

ASIC/IC Verification Trends With A Focus On Factors Of Silicon Success


At long last we come to the final installment of our four-part series presenting the findings of the Wilson Research Group Functional Verification 2020 study. In this article we discuss verification trends in IC/ASIC language and library adoption, low power management, and verification effectiveness. We then take a deeper dive into two somewhat surprising phenomena revealed in the data: the ... » read more

Beyond The Water Cooler: 2020 Report On IC/ASIC Design And Verification Trends


Verification and design engineers like to talk shop and discuss their experiences and visions. But even though engineers sharing stories around the water cooler (whatever form that takes—conferences, blogs, etc.) does provide all kinds of valuable insights, it doesn’t provide the full picture into the very large and complicated and extremely dynamic global semiconductor industry. To better ... » read more

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