Functional Safety: Current Status And Perspectives With A View Toward Standardization Bodies


Functional safety is a topic highly driven by standards. This is due in part to legislation and regulation, but it also arises from the fact that functional safety spans a wide range of fields. Even before specific standards were introduced, there were products that met the social consensus on safety. For example, carmakers were making cars that were safe and incorporated electrical and elec... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Chipmakers Getting Serious About Integrated Photonics


Integrating photonics into semiconductors is gaining traction, particularly in heterogeneous multi-die packages, as chipmakers search for new ways to overcome power limitations and deal with increasing volumes of data. Power has been a growing concern since the end of Dennard scaling, which happened somewhere around the 90nm node. There are more transistors per mm², and the wires are thinne... » read more

Getting Realistic About AI


By Olaf Enge-Rosenblatt and Andy Heinig The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) is omnipresent today, both in the news and on popular science shows. The number of possibilities for AI methods to assist people in making decisions are expanding rapidly. There are three main reasons for this: The development of new AI methods (deep learning, reinforcement learning); The continuous ... » read more

Dynamic Fault Injection Into Digital Twins Of Safety-Critical Systems


In this work we present a technology for dynamically introducing fault structures into digital twins without the need to change the virtual prototype model. The injection is done at the beginning of a simulation by dynamically rewiring the involved netlists. During the simulation on a real-time platform, faults can be activated or deactivated triggered by sequences, statistical effects or by ev... » read more

Virtual Prototyping In SoC Development


Modern semiconductor technologies enable manufacturers to pack more and more functions and memory into a single silicon die. While steadily advancing microintegration based on Moore’s Law just a few years ago mainly focused on increasing the clock frequency of integrated circuits (IC), today, it’s the design complexity and number of blocks that enable new IC functions. More and more logic b... » read more

Shifting Toward Data-Driven Chip Architectures


An explosion in data is forcing chipmakers to rethink where to process data, which are the best types of processors and memories for different types of data, and how to structure, partition and prioritize the movement of raw and processed data. New chips from systems companies such as Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and IBM all incorporate this approach. So do those developed by vendors like Appl... » read more

Targeting Redundancy In ICs


Technology developed for one purpose is often applicable to other areas, but organizational silos can get in the way of capitalizing on it until there is a clear cost advantage. Consider memory. All memories are fabricated with spare rows and columns that are swapped in when a device fails manufacturing test. "This is a common method to increase the yield of a device, based on how much memor... » read more

Failure Mechanism Detection Algorithm With MOSFET Body Diode


Autonomous driving is playing a big role in the automotive industry and defines the future of mobility on a big scale. However, autonomous driving faces several challenges, such as the performance of artificial intelligence and hardware reliability. To ensure safe functionality, the reliability of the electronic components plays an essential role and must be taken into consideration. One aspect... » read more

Do We Have An IC Model Crisis?


Models are critical for IC design. Without them, it's impossible to perform analysis, which in turn limits optimizations. Those optimizations are especially important as semiconductors become more heterogenous, more customized, and as they are integrated into larger systems, creating a need for higher-accuracy models that require massive compute power to develop. But those factors, and other... » read more

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