Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

Holistic FMEDA-Driven Safety Design And Verification For Analog, Digital, And Mixed-Signal Design


With state-of-the-art electronics propelling the automotive industry into the future, automotive OEMs require safety-certified semiconductors. The integration of these advanced technologies into cars drives a need for component suppliers to assess and audit the risk of the technologies they want to deploy. At the same time, safety requirements are constantly evolving and becoming more stringent... » read more

Amdahl Limits On AI


Software and hardware both place limits on how fast an application can run, but finding and eliminating the limitations is becoming more important in this age of multicore heterogeneous processing. The problem is certainly not new. Gene Amdahl (1922-2015) recognized the issue and published a paper about it in 1967. It provided the theoretical speedup for a defined task that could be expected... » read more

Innovations In Sensor Technology


Sensors are the “eyes” and “ears” of processors, co-processors, and computing modules. They come in all shapes, forms, and functions, and they are being deployed in a rapidly growing number of applications — from edge computing and IoT, to smart cities, smart manufacturing, hospitals, industrial, machine learning, and automotive. Each of these use cases relies on chips to capture d... » read more

The Physics Of Ports And Associated Ground For EM Simulators Serving RF Designs


The use of ports in electromagnetic (EM) simulators has evolved and matured over the years to make real-world design simulations practical. Having a foundational understanding of ports provides an intuitive skill in their proper selection and use in conjunction with circuit simulation. In this white paper, we examine ports common to EM simulators, which are the most common simulators for microw... » read more

Improving Energy And Power Efficiency In The Data Center


Energy costs in data centers are soaring as the amount of data being generated explodes, and it's being made worse by an imbalance between increasingly dense processing elements that are producing more heat and uneven server utilization, which requires more machines to be powered up and cooled. The challenge is to maximize utilization without sacrificing performance, and in the past that has... » read more

Why It’s So Difficult — And Costly — To Secure Chips


Rising concerns about the security of chips used in everything from cars to data centers are driving up the cost and complexity of electronic systems in a variety of ways, some obvious and others less so. Until very recently, semiconductor security was viewed more as a theoretical threat than a real one. Governments certainly worried about adversaries taking control of secure systems through... » read more

Advanced Packaging For Automotive Chips


Multiple types of chips may be better than one for dealing with large amounts and different types of data, but in automotive applications it's not entirely clear how or even whether they should be packaged together. The biggest problem with electronics in vehicles is the extreme range of temperatures, both within and outside of vehicles. Without adequate cooling, chips can age prematurely, s... » read more

Will Markets For ML Models Materialize?


Developers are spending increasing amounts of time and effort in creating machine-learning (ML) models for use in a wide variety of applications. While this will continue as the market matures, at some point some of these efforts might be seen as reinventing models over and over. Will developers of successful models ever have a marketplace in which they can sell those models as IP to other d... » read more

Missing Interposer Abstractions And Standards


The design and analysis of an SoC based on an interposer is not for the faint of heart today, but the industry is aware of the challenges and is attempting to solve them. Until that happens, however, it will be a technique that only large companies can deploy because they need to treat everything almost as if it were a single die. The construction of large systems uses techniques, such as ab... » read more

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