Unintended Coupling Issues Grow


The number of indirect and often unexpected ways in which one design element may be affected by another is growing, making it more difficult to ensure a chip — or multiple chips in a package — will perform reliably. Long gone are the days when the only way that one part of a circuit could influence another was by an intended wire connecting them. As geometries get smaller, frequencies go... » read more

Enhancing Datasets For Artificial Intelligence Through Model-Based Methods


By Dirk Mayer and Ulf Wetzker Industrial plants and processes are now digitized and networked, and AI can be used to evaluate the data generated by those facilities to increase productivity and quality. Machine learning (ML) methods can be applied to: Product quality classification in complex production processes. Condition monitoring of technical systems, which is used, for examp... » read more

13000 FPS Vision System-on-Chip With Mixed-Signal Compressed Sensing


This paper presents a monolithic high-speed VSoC (Vision-System-on-Chip) with three software-programmable 16-bit ASIPs (application-specific instruction-set processors), a 1024-fold column-parallel data path of charge-based convolution functionality, freely configurable A/D conversion, 8-bit processor elements with 128 bytes of RAM each, and asynchronously compressing output of sparse column da... » read more

What Causes Semiconductor Aging?


Semiconductor technology has evolved to the point where no one can assume chips will last forever. If not carefully considered, aging can shorten the life of an IC below the needs for an intended application. Aging is well studied in technology circles, but while others less directly involved may understand at a general level this is a problem, it's not always obvious why. So what exactly ar... » read more

AI Goes Ultra Low Power — Part 1


Based on the concept of the new Federal Agency for Jump Innovations (PSRIN-D), the BMBF initiated three pilot innovation competitions. One of them presented the participants with the task of developing the most energy-efficient AI system possible as a hardware implementation on an ASIC or FPGA. With this, a stack of hundreds of two-minute long ECG signals should be analyzed with a minimum of en... » read more

Preventing Failures Before They Occur


A decade or so ago, when MEMS sensors were in the limelight, one of the touted applications was to install them on industrial or other equipment to get an advance warning if the equipment was approaching failure. Today, in-circuit monitoring brings the same promise. Are these competing technologies? Or can they be made to work together? “Almost all advanced tool manufacturing companies ... » read more

Manufacturing Shifts To AI Of Things


AI is being infused into the Internet of Things, setting the stage for significant improvements in manufacturing productivity, improved uptime, and reduced costs — regardless of market segment. The traditional approach to improving manufacturing equipment reliability and efficiency is regular scheduled maintenance. While that is an improvement over just fixing or replacing equipment when i... » read more

Holistic Die-to-Die Interface Design Methodology for 2.5-D Multichip-Module Systems


Abstract: "More than Moore technologies can be supported by system-level diversification enabled by chiplet-based integrated systems within multichip modules (MCMs) and silicon interposer-based 2.5-D systems. The division of large system-on-chip dies into smaller chiplets with different technology nodes specific to the chiplet application requirement enables the performance enhancement at the ... » read more

Continuous Integration For Digital Design


By Christian Skubich and Nico Peter In 2001, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development [1] laid the foundation for many modern software development processes. Today, 20 years later, agile methods are in widespread use in numerous domains. Out of the participants in the study Status Quo (Scaled) Agile 2020 [2], only 9% still relied on classic project management methods. One core element... » read more

Design Meets EDA: Gaps And Countermeasures In Analog/Mixed-Signal IC Design


Along the path from specification to silicon, the design of analog/mixed-signal chips comprises a variety of challenges. They are of technological, methodological, organizational, communicational, and business nature. Additionally, large gaps are to be managed among the individual challenges. Still up to now, approaches such as the “four eye principle” are used even in industrial practice i... » read more

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