Test Is Becoming A Horizontal Process


Semiconductor test, once a discrete part of a well-orchestrated series of manufacturing steps, is looking more like a process that extends from the early concept stage in design to the end of life of whatever system that chip ultimately is used for. This has important ramifications for safety-critical markets in general, and the semiconductor industry in particular. Both worlds have been inc... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 12


Complexity is growing by process node, by end application, and in each design. The latest crop of blogs points to just how many dependencies and uncertainties exist today, and what the entire supply chain is doing about them. Mentor's Shivani Joshi digs into various types of constraints in PCBs. Cadence's Neelabh Singh examines the complexities of verifying a lane adapter state machine in... » read more

Millimeter Wave: A Bridge Too Far?


5G is here. It already is available in new mobile phones, and the infrastructure for extremely fast cellular communication is being built out at a rapid pace. The big question now is which parts of this technology will be successful, and there still is no consistency in those predictions. 5G comes in two flavors, sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave, and the sub-6 GHz version offers immediate perfo... » read more

Using Static Analysis For Functional Safety


Fadi Maamari, group director for R&D at Synopsys, explains why static analysis is suddenly in demand in auto chip design, how it can help to choose the best implementation of functional safety approaches, and where it fits into the design flow. » read more

3 Safety Standards For Auto Electronics


Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, drills down into the three main safety standards, ISO 26262, SOTIF (Safety of the Intended Function) and UL 4600, what each one covers, what the intent is behind them, and what this means for companies developing technology for future vehicles. » read more

Optimizing Hardware Faster


Maximillian Odendahl, CEO of Silexica, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about high-level synthesis and the changing role of this technology. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What is the direction that high-level synthesis is heading in? Odendahl: The direction hasn’t changed, but in the past HLS was not usable by the software guys. The main push right n... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services Rambus reports completing the sale of its Payments and Ticketing businesses to Visa for $75 million in cash. “With 30 years of experience pushing the envelope in semiconductor design, we look toward a future of continued innovation to carry on our mission of making data faster and safer,” Rambus President and CEO Luc Seraphin said in a statement. “Completing this transa... » read more

Adjusting The Finish Line In Auto Electronics


There are two big hurdles in automotive electronics. One is developing autonomous vehicles, and the other is the electrification of those vehicles. In both cases, the development time may be a lot longer and more costly than anyone expected, and the impact may be much more far-reaching than the initial effort would suggest. For automakers, the key question in all of this is how they will dif... » read more

Road Not Fully Constructed


There is a growing consensus in the semiconductor industry that SAE Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy will be full of unexpected hazards. At a number of recent conferences in Silicon Valley, experts from all parts of the semiconductor industry have voiced concern about those middle steps between assisted driving and full autonomy. This isn't the public position taken by carmakers and Tier 1s.... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 8


Predicting battery life Researchers at Stanford University, MIT, and Toyota Research Institute developed a machine learning model that can predict how long a lithium-ion battery can be expected to perform. The researchers' model was trained on a few hundred million data points of batteries charging and discharging. The dataset consists of 124 commercial lithium iron phosphate/graphite cells... » read more

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