What Future Processors Will Look Like


Mark Papermaster, CTO at AMD, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about architectural changes that are required as the benefits of scaling decrease, including chiplets, new standards for heterogeneous integration, and different types of memory. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What does a processor look like in five years? Is it a bunch of chips in a package? I... » read more

Toward Democratized IC Design And Customized Computing


Integrated circuit (IC) design is often considered a “black art,” restricted to only those with advanced degrees or years of training in electrical engineering. Given that the semiconductor industry is struggling to expand its workforce, IC design must be rendered more accessible. The benefit of customized computing General-purpose computers are widely used, but their performance improv... » read more

ML Focus Shifting Toward Software


New machine-learning (ML) architectures continue to garner a huge amount of attention as the race continues to provide the most effective acceleration architectures for the cloud and the edge, but attention is starting to shift from the hardware to the software tools. The big question now is whether a software abstraction eventually will win out over hardware details in determining who the f... » read more

Power Grids Under Attack


Cyberattacks are becoming as troublesome to the electrical power grid as natural disasters, and the problem is growing worse as these grids become more connected and smarter. Unlike in the past, when a power outage affected just the electricity supplied to homes and businesses, power grids are becoming core elements of smart cities, infrastructure, and safety-related services. Without power,... » read more

Making PUFs Even More Secure


As security has become a must-have in most systems, hardware roots of trust (HRoTs) have started appearing in many chips. Critical to an HRoT is the ability to authenticate and to create keys – ideally from a reliable source that is unviewable and immutable. “We see hardware roots of trust deployed in two use models — providing a foundation to securely start a system, and enabling a se... » read more

The High But Often Unnecessary Cost Of Coherence


Cache coherency, a common technique for improving performance in chips, is becoming less useful as general-purpose processors are supplemented with, and sometimes supplanted by, highly specialized accelerators and other processing elements. While cache coherency won't disappear anytime soon, it is increasingly being viewed as a luxury necessary to preserve a long-standing programming paradig... » read more

Effectively Addressing The Challenge Of Securing Connected And Autonomous Vehicles


Vehicles are becoming the most sophisticated connected objects in the ‘Internet of Things’. As vehicles integrate functionality that will enable a fully autonomous future, the attack surface grows substantially. Combined with remote connectivity at multiple points, the clock is ticking in a race to improve cybersecurity in all types of vehicles to ensure that all stakeholders, but particula... » read more

What’s Missing For Designing Chips At The System Level


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

New Approaches For Processor Architectures


Processor vendors are starting to emphasize microarchitectural improvements and data movement over process node scaling, setting the stage for much bigger performance gains in devices that narrowly target what end users are trying to accomplish. The changes are a recognition that domain specificity, and the ability to adjust or adapt designs to unique workloads, are now the best way to impro... » read more

Making Lidar More Useful


Lidar, one of a trio of “vision” technologies slated for cars of the future, is improving both in terms of form and function. Willard Tu, director of automotive at Xilinx, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about different approaches and tradeoffs between cost, compute intensity and resolution, various range and field of view options, and why convolutional neural networks are so important... » read more

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