Goal-Driven AI


For many, the long-term dream for AI within EDA is the ability to define a set of goals and tell the computer to go design it for them. A short while later, an optimized design will pop out. All of today's EDA tools will remain hidden, if they even exist at all. You would only be limited by your imagination. But we also know that AI is not to be trusted today, especially when millions of dol... » read more

How AI Is Transforming System Design


Experts At The Table: ChatGPT and other LLMs have attracted most of the attention in recent years, but other forms of AI have long been incorporated into design workflows. The technology has become so common that many designers may not even realize it’s a part of the tools they use every day. But its adoption is spreading deeper into tools and methodologies. Semiconductor Engineering sat down... » read more

GenAI + Semiconductors + Humanity


Silicon Catalyst held its 2024 Semiconductor Industry Forum in Mountain View, CA, at the Computer History Museum on November 13th. Richard Curtin, managing partner for Si Catalyst, opened the event by thanking David House, vice chair of the Board at the Computer History Museum and creator of the 4004 processor, and the CHM staff for hosting the event. Richard talked about the start of se... » read more

Managing The Huge Power Demands Of AI Everywhere


Before generative AI burst onto the scene, no one predicted how much energy would be needed to power AI systems. Those numbers are just starting to come into focus, and so is the urgency about how to sustain it all. AI power demand is expected to surge 550% by 2026, from 8 TWh in 2024 to 52 TWh, before rising another 1,150% to 652 TWh by 2030. Commensurately, U.S. power grid planners have do... » read more

Mass Customization For AI Inference


Rising complexity in AI models and an explosion in the number and variety of networks is leaving chipmakers torn between fixed-function acceleration and more programmable accelerators, and creating some novel approaches that include some of both. By all accounts, a general-purpose approach to AI processing is not meeting the grade. General-purpose processors are exactly that. They're not des... » read more

Using AI To Glue Disparate IC Ecosystem Data


AI holds the potential to change how companies interact throughout the global semiconductor ecosystem, gluing together different data types and processes that can be shared between companies that in the past had little or no direct connections. Chipmakers always have used abstraction layers to see the bigger picture of how the various components of a chip go together, allowing them to pinpoi... » read more

RAG-Enabled AI Stops Hallucinations, Adds Sources


Many EDA companies have taken the first steps to incorporate generative AI into their tools, and in such tightly controlled environments GenAI appears to have great benefits. But its broader adoption has been delayed by its notorious inaccuracy, giving results that are often out of date, untrue, and unsourced. That's starting to change. GenAI is evolving so rapidly that these kinds of proble... » read more

HBM4 Feeds Generative AI’s Hunger For More Memory Bandwidth


Generative AI (Gen AI), built on the exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their kin, is one of today’s biggest drivers of computing technology. Leading-edge LLMs now exceed a trillion parameters and offer multimodal capabilities so they can take a broad range of inputs, whether they’re in the form of text, speech, images, video, code, and more, and generate an equally broa... » read more

New AI Processors Architectures Balance Speed With Efficiency


Leading AI systems designs are migrating away from building the fastest AI processor possible, adopting a more balanced approach that involves highly specialized, heterogeneous compute elements, faster data movement, and significantly lower power. Part of this shift revolves around the adoption of chiplets in 2.5D/3.5D packages, which enable greater customization for different workloads and ... » read more

Memory Implications Of Gen AI In Gaming


The global gaming market across hardware, software and services is on track to exceed annual revenues of $500B in 2025.1 That’s bigger by an order of magnitude than the combination of movies and music. On the cutting edge of that enormous market is open world gaming, where the driving goal is to give players the freedom to do anything they can imagine in a coherent and immersive environment. ... » read more

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