Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is expected to list solely on a U.S. stock exchange when it goes public again later this year, forgoing the London Stock Exchange for now, the BBC reports. Global investment banks expect the offering to value the company between $30 billion and $70 billion, according to Bloomberg. Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for cont... » read more

Uneven Circuit Aging Becoming A Bigger Problem


Circuit aging is emerging as a first-order design challenge as engineering teams look for new ways to improve reliability and ensure the functionality of chips throughout their expected lifetimes. The need for reliability is obvious in data centers and automobiles, where a chip failure could result in downtime or injury. It also is increasingly important in mobile and consumer electronics, w... » read more

IEDM: Backside Power Delivery


One part of the short course that I attended at IEDM in December was about backside power delivery networks. It was presented by Gaspard Hiblot of imec and titled "Process Architectures Changes to Improve Power Delivery." The presentation is co-credited with Geert Hellings and Julien Ryckaert. I should preface this post with the fact that this presentation was 80 slides long and so I will only... » read more

What Makes RISC-V Verification Unique?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the verification of RISC-V processors with Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Mike Eftimakis, vice president for strategy and ecosystem at Codasip; Simon Davidmann, founder and CEO of Imperas Software; Sven Beyer, program manager for processor verification at Siemens EDA; Kiran Vittal, senior director of alliances partner... » read more

Blog Review: March 8


Synopsys' Rahul Thukral and Bhavana Chaurasia find that embedded MRAM is undergoing an uplift in utilization for low-power, advanced-node SoCs thanks to its high capacity, high density, and ability to scale to lower geometries. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear dives into the UVM Factory with a look at the  SystemVerilog Object-Oriented Programming concepts behind the factory. Cadence's Veena Pa... » read more

What’s At Stake In System Design?


What You Will Gain From This eBook: Power and Signal Integrity Insights into harmonic balancing and crosstalk analysis Learning about loop gain and transmission rates Examining the necessity of power-aware systems Electromagnetic Analysis Knowledge about the state of electromagnetics in wireless networks Insight into RADAR and LiDAR EM profiles Tips for bending, meshin... » read more

Test Challenges Mount As Demands For Reliability Increase


An emphasis of improving semiconductor quality is beginning to spread well beyond just data centers and automotive applications, where ICs play a role in mission- and safety-critical applications. But this focus on improved reliability is ratcheting up pressure throughout the test community, from lab to fab and into the field, in products where transistor density continues to grow — and wh... » read more

Auto Cyberattacks Becoming More Widespread


As vehicles become smarter, more complex, and increasingly connected, they also become more prone to cyberattacks. The challenge now is to keep pace with hackers, who are continually devising new and innovative ways to attack both software and hardware in vehicles. Recent statistics bear this out. In 2022, there was a big spike in deep/dark web activity and incidents related to application p... » read more

Robust Design Optimization Of A Ford Turbocharger Compressor


What is robust design optimization (RDO), and is it better than standard optimization? In this customer case, we describe a multi-disciplinary optimization of a turbocharger compressor from Ford Motor Company, in which we demonstrate it is. RDO combines standard numerical optimization with sensitivity analysis to take into account the influence of manufacturing variations and operating uncer... » read more

AI: Engineering Tool Or Threat To Jobs?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about using AI for designing and testing complex chips with Michael Jackson, corporate vice president for R&D at Cadence; Joel Sumner, vice president of semiconductor and electronics engineering at National Instruments; Grace Yu, product and engineering manager at Meta; David Pan, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering a... » read more

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