Foundry Wars Begin

By Mark LaPedus - 19 Apr, 2021 - Comments: 3

Leading-edge foundry vendors are gearing up for a new, high-stakes spending and technology race, setting the stage for a possible shakeup across the semiconductor manufacturing landscape. In March, Intel re-entered the foundry business, positioning itself against Samsung and TSMC at the leading edge, and against a multitude of foundries working at older nodes. Intel announced plans to build ... » read more

Verification Effectiveness In The Face Of FPGA Complexity: The 2020 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study

By Harry Foster - 08 Apr, 2021 - Comments: 0

Making informed decisions backed by good data is the key to success in highly competitive, robust markets such as FPGA design and verification. Helping our community in that endeavor is the motivation behind the worldwide Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study. We also use that information to make sure our research and development efforts continue to deliver the solutions our cu... » read more

Processing With FPGAs On Mars

By Farhad Fallahlalehzari - 25 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

Tasked with finding life in the form of microorganisms, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars at about 04:00 EST on February 18, 2021. The rover has multiple sensors and cameras to collect as much data as possible and, due to the volume of live data being recorded and the long data transmission time from Mars to Earth, a powerful processing system is essential. However, whereas early Mars ro... » read more

Tradeoffs To Improve Performance, Lower Power

By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

Generic chips are no longer acceptable in competitive markets, and the trend is growing as designs become increasingly heterogeneous and targeted to specific workloads and applications. From the edge to the cloud, including everything from vehicles, smartphones, to commercial and industrial machinery, the trend increasingly is on maximizing performance using the least amount of energy. This ... » read more

Virtualizing FPGAs For Multiple Cloud Users

By Song Yao - 04 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

Cloud computing has become the new computing paradigm. For cloud computing, virtualization is necessary to enable isolation between users, high flexibility and scalability, high security, and maximized utilization of hardware resources. Since 2017, because of the advantages of programmability, low latency, and high energy efficiency, FPGA has been widely adopted into cloud computing. Amazon ... » read more

Making Sense Of New Edge-Inference Architectures

By Bryon Moyer - 04 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

New edge-inference machine-learning architectures have been arriving at an astounding rate over the last year. Making sense of them all is a challenge. To begin with, not all ML architectures are alike. One of the complicating factors in understanding the different machine-learning architectures is the nomenclature used to describe them. You’ll see terms like “sea-of-MACs,” “systolic... » read more

Security In FPGAs And SoCs

By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 0

Chip security is becoming a bigger problem across different markets, with different emerging standards and more sophisticated attacks. Jason Moore, senior director of engineering at Xilinx, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about current and future threats and what can be done about them. » read more

Usage Models Driving Data Center Architecture Changes

By Ann Mutschler - 11 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 0

Data center architectures are undergoing a significant change, fueled by more data and much greater usage from remote locations. Part of this shift involves the need to move some processing closer to the various memory hierarchies, from SRAM to DRAM to storage. There is more data to process, and it takes less energy and time to process that data in place. But workloads also are being distrib... » read more

The Chip Industry’s Next-Gen Roadmap

By Mark LaPedus - 21 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 1

Todd Younkin, the new president and chief executive of the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about engineering careers, R&D trends and what’s ahead for chip technologies over the next decade. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As a U.S.-based chip consortium, what is SRC's charter? Younkin: The Semiconductor Research... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 16

By Jesse Allen - 16 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Arm's Benoit Labbe investigates why battery monitoring is so important for a low-power microcontroller and shows how it was implemented in the M0N0 MCU while drawing a fraction of a nW in typical conditions. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at how much of their time FPGA design engineers spend on verification, and the tasks that keep verification engineers the busiest. Synopsys' Sc... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
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