Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Acquisitions & Investments California-based MaxLinear plans to acquire Taiwan-based Silicon Motion (SMI), in a cash and stock deal valued at about $3.8 billion. Silicon Motion’s NAND flash controller technology for solid state storage devices, will extend MaxLinear’s RF, analog, and mixed signal portfolio. ISMC will invest about $3 billion in a semiconductor plant in India’s south... » read more

Technical Paper Round-up: May 3


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=24 /] Semiconductor Engineering is in the process of building this library of research papers. Please send suggestions (via comments section below) for what else you’d like us to incorporate. If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a good fit for... » read more

A Case for Transparent Reliability in DRAM Systems


New technical paper from ETH Zurich and TU Delft. Abstract "Today's systems have diverse needs that are difficult to address using one-size-fits-all commodity DRAM. Unfortunately, although system designers can theoretically adapt commodity DRAM chips to meet their particular design goals (e.g., by reducing access timings to improve performance, implementing system-level RowHammer mitigati... » read more

Academic Research Paper Round-Up: April 13


The volume of research into advanced semiconductors is rising and widening. The latest batch includes hybrid power-gating architecture, RRAM devices models, improved FMEA, quantum machine learning, enhanced nonlinear optics, harvesting energy after sundown, direct chemisorption-assisted nanotransfer printing, and more. Topping the list of researchers this week are ETH Zurich, Stanford Unive... » read more

DarkGates: A Hybrid Power-Gating Architecture to Mitigate the Performance Impact of Dark-Silicon in High Performance Processors


New research paper from ETH Zurich and others. Abstract "To reduce the leakage power of inactive (dark) silicon components, modern processor systems shut-off these components' power supply using low-leakage transistors, called power-gates. Unfortunately, power-gates increase the system's power-delivery impedance and voltage guardband, limiting the system's maximum attainable voltage (i.e., ... » read more

Benchmarking Memory-Centric Computing Systems: Analysis of Real Processing-in-Memory Hardware


Abstract "Many modern workloads such as neural network inference and graph processing are fundamentally memory-bound. For such workloads, data movement between memory and CPU cores imposes a significant overhead in terms of both latency and energy. A major reason is that this communication happens through a narrow bus with high latency and limited bandwidth, and the low data reuse in memory-bo... » read more

SparseP: Towards Efficient Sparse Matrix Vector Multiplication on Real Processing-In-Memory Systems


Abstract "Several manufacturers have already started to commercialize near-bank Processing-In-Memory (PIM) architectures. Near-bank PIM architectures place simple cores close to DRAM banks and can yield significant performance and energy improvements in parallel applications by alleviating data access costs. Real PIM systems can provide high levels of parallelism, large aggregate memory bandwi... » read more

Why RISC-V Is Succeeding


There is no disputing the excitement surround the introduction of the RISC-V processor architecture. Yet while many have called it a harbinger of a much broader open-source hardware movement, the reasons behind its success are not obvious, and the implications for an expansion of more open-source cores is far from certain. “The adoption of RISC-V as the preferred architecture for many sili... » read more

Metasurface Colloidal Quantum Dot Photodetectors


Abstract: "Efficient photodetectors that can be easily engineered for a specific spectral window are of high interest. Here, we report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of metasurface-enhanced photodetectors and photodiodes using colloidal quantum dots. We fabricate photoconductors optimized for the wavelength range around 1550 nm featuring responsivities of up to 8000 A/W wit... » read more

QUAC-TRNG: High-Throughput True Random Number Generation Using Quadruple Row Activation in Commodity DRAM Chips


Abstract "True random number generators (TRNG) sample random physical processes to create large amounts of random numbers for various use cases, including security-critical cryptographic primitives, scientific simulations, machine learning applications, and even recreational entertainment. Unfortunately, not every computing system is equipped with dedicated TRNG hardware, limiting the applicat... » read more

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