Failure Analysis Becoming Critical To Reliability


Failure analysis is rapidly becoming a complex, costly and increasingly time-consuming must-do task as demand rises for reliability across a growing range of devices used in markets ranging from automotive to 5G. From the beginning, failure analysis has been about finding out what went wrong in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Different approaches, tools and equipment have improved ov... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Presto Engineering, an outsourced operations provider to semiconductor and IoT device manufacturers, acquired the DELTA Microelectronics business unit of FORCE Technology. The acquisition adds DELTA's ASIC design and manufacturing to its portfolio. The two companies will retain a strong relationship: FORCE Technology has become a shareholder of Presto Engineering and Juan Farré, FORCE’s CTO,... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys will acquire certain IP assets of INVECAS. The acquisition expands Synopsys' DesignWare Logic Library, General Purpose I/O, Embedded Memory, Interface and Analog IP portfolio. The acquisition will also add a team of experienced R&D engineers to focus on physical IP across a range of process technologies. INVECAS will retain its HDMI IP and ASIC Design Solutions businesses. The deal... » read more

Week In Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Internet of Things Sensors that see in the dark, look deep into our faces and hear the impossible, were all part of ams’ CES lineup this week. ams announced that it has designed an advanced spectral ambient light sensor (ALS) for high-end mobile phone cameras. The ALS, called the AS7350, identifies the light source and makes an accurate white balance under low-light and other non-ideal condi... » read more

Can Germany’s Auto Industry Keep Pace?


Germany's strength for the past half-century has been its automotive industry. The big question now is whether that also will become its biggest vulnerability. Challenged on all fronts by fundamental shifts in automotive technology, the German auto industry is struggling to transform itself from precision metal bending to advanced electronics, and so far its future in the face of competitors... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 10


Semicon West It’s Semicon West time again. Here’s the first wave of announcements at the event: Applied Materials has unveiled a pair of tools aimed at accelerating the industry adoption for new memories. First, Applied rolled out the Endura Clover MRAM PVD system. The system is an integrated platform for MRAM devices. Second, the company introduced the Endura Impulse PVD platform for P... » read more

Temperature Reduction on a High-Power Thermal Demonstrator


High-power applications in microelectronic devices and systems is a crucial and severe issue that may cause elevated thermal and thermomechanical phenomena and finally lead the fabricated system to degradation, limitation of its performance, or even failure and destruction of its features. In specific applications, such as those found in the industry and the automotive sector, the power pro... » read more

Low-Latency Image Acquisition And Processing With A Programmable Vision-System-On-Chip


This work aims to demonstrate the benefits of using a Vision-System-on-Chip for image processing tasks with very high latency demands between image acquisition and processing. By leveraging a column-parallel, mixed-signal data path, which is entirely software-defined by three application-specific instruction- set processors (ASIPs), image data within multiple regions of interest can be analyzed... » read more

Chip Aging Becomes Design Problem


Chip aging is a growing problem at advanced nodes, but so far most design teams have not had to deal with it. That will change significantly as new reliability requirements roll out across markets such as automotive, which require a complete analysis of factors that affect aging. Understanding the underlying physics is critical, because it can lead to unexpected results and vulnerabilities. ... » read more

A High-Speed Asynchronous Multi-Input Pipeline For Compaction And Transfer of Parallel SIMD Data


Image sensors with programmable, highly parallel signal processing, so called Vision-Systems-on-Chip, perform computationally intensive tasks directly on the sensor itself. Therefore it is possible to limit the amount of output data to relevant image features only. Reading out such features presents a major challenge, since the position and number of features often is not known. Conventional sy... » read more

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