Thinking Way, Way Outside The Box


The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium has set records for global cooperation by giant companies, universities and various federal agencies and national laboratories. But it also may have cracked opened a door for much more than that. Until now, there has been a massive race for dominance in the data center. Big companies have gotten rich on data, building infrastructure at a col... » read more

Designing Ultra Low Power AI Processors


AI chip design is beginning to shift direction as more computing moves to the edge, adding a level of sophistication and functionality that typically was relegated to the cloud, but in a power envelope compatible with a battery. These changes leverage many existing tools, techniques and best practices for chip design. But they also are beginning to incorporate a variety of new approaches tha... » read more

Stream Vs. Pool Data Processing


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, looks at the very different data processing requirements at the edge and in the data center, and what really drives efficiency and speed in applications such as automotive. » read more

More Multiply-Accumulate Operations Everywhere


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to build programmable edge inferencing chips, embedded FPGAs, where the markets are developing for both, and how the picture will change over the next few years. SE: What do you have to think about when you're designing a programmable inferencing chip? Tate: With a traditional FPGA architecture you ha... » read more

PCIe 5.0 Drill-Down


Suresh Andani, senior director of product marketing for SerDes IP at Rambus, digs into the new PCI Express standard, why it’s so important for data centers, how it compares with previous versions of the standard, and how it will fit into existing and non-von Neumann architectures. » read more

Power Management Becomes Top Issue Everywhere


Power management is becoming a bigger challenge across a wide variety of applications, from consumer products such as televisions and set-top-boxes to large data centers, where the cost of cooling server racks to offset the impact of thermal dissipation can be enormous. Several years ago, low-power design was largely relegated to mobile devices that were dependent on a battery. Since then, i... » read more

Machine Learning At The Edge


Moving machine learning to the edge has critical requirements on power and performance. Using off-the-shelf solutions is not practical. CPUs are too slow, GPUs/TPUs are expensive and consume too much power, and even generic machine learning accelerators can be overbuilt and are not optimal for power. In this paper, learn about creating new power/memory efficient hardware architectures to meet n... » read more

New Architectural Issues Facing Auto Ecosystem


As chips bound for the automotive world move to small process nodes, including 5nm and below, the automotive ecosystem is wrestling with both scaling issues and challenges related to architecting safety-critical systems using fewer chips. This may sound counterintuitive, because one of the main reasons automotive chip providers are moving to smaller nodes is to reduce the number of chips in ... » read more

The Challenges Of Building Inferencing Chips


Putting a trained algorithm to work in the field is creating a frenzy of activity across the chip world, spurring designs that range from purpose-built specialty processors and accelerators to more generalized extensions of existing and silicon-proven technologies. What's clear so far is that no single chip architecture has been deemed the go-to solution for inferencing. Machine learning is ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


AI/Edge Arm putting AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning (ML) on the Cortex-M processor by offering IP for a microNPU for Cortex-M. The company says in a press release that it will deliver a 480x uplift in ML performance. The new Cortex-M IP is Arm Ethos-U55 NPU, which Arm says is the industry’s first microNPU (neural processing unit). Arm is hoping the new IP will start an expl... » read more

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