The Limits Of AI’s Role In EDA Tools


The world has been inspired by generative AI models like ChatGPT. These are very applicable to things like copilots and agentic AI, but the adoption of these models into EDA tools is less obvious. What may be appropriate, and can AI make EDA tools faster or better? EDA has been enabling Moore's Law for the past 40 years, and that has required pushing the limits of many of the algorithms and ... » read more

Physical Access Control Raises New Security Concerns


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including fundamental security of GenAI, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Siemens EDA; Mohit... » read more

The Painful Reality Of Scaling Cloud AI


The shift to Generative AI (GenAI) has overwhelmed existing infrastructure, transforming previously rare issues into daily operational realities. Skyrocketing costs, intense energy consumption, and hardware failures at unprecedented scales illustrate the strain of current AI workloads. With models like GPT-4 costing tens of millions and GPT-5 projected to surpass a billion-dollar threshold, the... » read more

Security Tradeoffs: A Difficult Balance


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including new threat models from AI-based attacks, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Sieme... » read more

GenAI’s Breakneck Pace Is Reshaping The Semiconductor Industry


Humankind is witnessing a technological revolution so extreme that its full magnitude might extend beyond the scope of our intellect. Generative AI (GenAI) is doubling its performance every six months [1], outpacing Moore's law in what the industry calls Hyper Moore's Law. Some cloud AI chipmakers expect to double or triple performance every year for the next ten years [2]. In this three-part b... » read more

AI: A New Tool For Hackers, And For Preventing Attacks


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including new threat models from AI-based attacks, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Siemens EDA; Mohit Arora, seni... » read more

Iteration And Hallucination


Iteration loops have been a vital aspect of EDA flows for decades. Ever since gate delays and wire delays became comparable, it became necessary to find out if the result of a given logic synthesis run would yield acceptable timing. Over the years this problem became worse because one decision can affect many others. The ramifications of a decision may not have been obvious to an individual too... » read more

New Ways To Improve EDA Productivity


EDA vendors are taking aim at new ways to improve the productivity of design and verification engineers, who are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in chip complexity in tight time-to-market windows and with constrained engineering talent pipelines. In the past, progress often was as straightforward as improving algorithms or parallelizing computations in a linear flow. But w... » read more

AI For The Edge: Why Open-Weight Models Matter


The rapid advancements in AI have brought powerful large language models (LLMs) to the forefront. However, most high-performing models are massive, compute-heavy, and require cloud-based inference, making them impractical for edge computing. The recent release of DeepSeek-R1 is an early, but unlikely to be the only, example of how open-weight AI models, combined with efficient distillation t... » read more

The Rise Of Generative AI On The Edge


Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have undergone significant transformations over the past decade. The revolution of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is evolving toward the adoption of transformers and generative AI (GenAI), marking a pivotal shift in the field. This transition is driven by the need for more accurate, efficient, and ... » read more

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