Neuromorphic Chip Biz Heats Up


It’s no secret that today’s computers are struggling to keep up with the enormous demands of data processing and bandwidth, and the whole electronics industry is searching for new ways to enable that. The traditional approach is to continue to push the limits of today’s systems and chips. Another way is to go down the non-traditional route, including an old idea that is generating stea... » read more

Inside AI And Deep Learning


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk with Dave Schubmehl, research director for content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems at International Data Corp. (IDC), a market research firm. Schubmehl’s research covers information access, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, deep learning, machine learning and other topics. He also addressed neuromorphic technology. What follows... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about consolidation, Moore's Law, and where the opportunities are in the IoT and automotive markets. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the big concerns for the semiconductor industry in general, and EDA in particular? Tan: Top on my list is all the consolidation that's goin... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Consolidation And Innovation


Consolidation is happening across the semiconductor industry, in ways that are very apparent and others that aren't so obvious. On the chipmaker side, NXP's acquisition of Freescale, Avago's acquisition of Broadcom and LSI, and Intel's acquisition of Altera are so big that they require approval by multiple governments. Less obvious are moves such as Apple's build out of its processor team, a... » read more

It’s Not What You Own, It’s What You Know


Shifting business models can change the rules. The ecosystems that define our manufacturing, procurement and delivery processes, along with the customer buying behaviors associated with those processes, can shift dramatically over time, resulting in a world that seems to be upside down at first glance. The exodus of mainstream manufacturing out of certain countries is an example of these shifts... » read more

One-On-One: Dark Servers


Professor Michael Taylor’s research group at UC San Diego is studying ways to exploit dark silicon to optimize circuit designs for energy efficiency. He spoke with Semiconductor Engineering about the post-Dennard scaling regime, energy efficiency from integrated circuits all the way up to data centers, and how the manufacturing side can help. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To... » read more

Big Acquisitions, Big Changes


Rumors swirling about Intel's romance with Altera—this has been off-again, on-again, and now apparently off-again, for the better part of a decade—coupled with Apple's decision to shift A9 APU production to Samsung and away from TSMC, NXP's pending acquisition of Freescale, along with the Chinese' government's massive semiconductor investment fund, all add up to some massive shifts under wa... » read more

Rethinking The Cloud


Data center architectures have seen very few radical changes since the commercial introduction of the [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"] System/360 mainframe in 1964. There have been incremental improvements in speed and throughput over the years, with a move to a client/server model in the 1990s, but from a high level this is still an environment where data is processed and stored centrally ... » read more

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