New Battleground In The Data Race


For the past couple years, giant commercial data centers have been grabbing as much data as possible. The big question now is whether that investment will pay off. Companies such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and Baidu are not necessarily the best equipped to leverage that data—or at least not yet. In fact, most of what they've been focusing on is a narrow slice of the data being coll... » read more

Domain Expertise Becoming Essential For Analytics


Sensors are being added into everything, from end devices to the equipment used to make those sensors, but the data being generated has limited or no value unless it's accompanied by domain expertise. There are two main problems. One is how and where to process the vast amount of data being generated. Chip and system architectures are being revamped to pre-process more of that data closer to... » read more

Using Data Analytics More Effectively


The semiconductor industry is under a lot of pressure from their customers nowadays. They’re expected to keep up with consumer expectations for shorter electronic product life cycles, without compromising on the reliability and quality of the components and products coming off the line. A recent article from McKinsey & Company, however, describes how quality procedures have become a bottl... » read more

Variability In Chip Manufacturing


Brewer Science’s Jim Korich talks about how to deal with variability in processes and why consistency in materials is so important at advanced nodes. https://youtu.be/U1KkUmtmqpE » read more

Faster Verification With AI, ML


Tool providers have continually improved the performance, capacity, and memory footprint parameters of functional verification engines over the past decade. Today, although the core anchors are still formal verification, simulation, emulation, and FPGA-based prototyping, a new frontier focusing on the verification fabric itself aims to make better use of these engines including planning, alloca... » read more

On-Chip Monitoring Of FinFETs


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss on-chip monitoring and its impact on power, security and reliability, including predictive maintenance. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What new problems are you seeing in design? Crosher: There are challenges emerging for companies working on advanced nodes, including scaling and trans... » read more

Using Data To Improve Yield


Semiconductor manufacturers are always looking for an edge to improve operating efficiency and to increase yields on chip lots. For some, the answers include big data analytics, as well as technology to move that data around more quickly. Chipmakers, board assemblers, and related businesses are turning to the Internet of Things, especially [getkc id="78" kc_name="Industrial IoT"] technology... » read more

Listening To The Voice Of Your Product


Much has been said and written about the business values of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Through connecting the manufacturing elements (machines) on the factory floor, and collecting and analyzing their data, manufacturers can significantly improve the efficiency and profitability of their operations through intelligent predictive maintenance of equipment and optimal equipment ut... » read more

7nm Power Issues And Solutions


Being able to achieve 35% speed improvement, 65% power reduction and 3.3X higher density makes adopting a 7nm process for your next system-on-chip (SoC) design seem like an easy decision. However, with $271 million in estimated total design cost and 500 man-years it would take to bring a mid-range 7nm SoC to production, companies need to carefully weigh the benefits against the cost of designin... » read more

MapD Makes GPUs First-Class Citizens


It’s now well known that with the latest innovations in parallel programming and GPU technology, graphics processing units (GPUs) can be harnessed today to deal with the enormous data sets regularly encountered in applications ranging from ADAS, artificial intelligence, and gaming to deep learning, scientific computation, and high-performance computing. But how exactly do you find what you... » read more

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