IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Highlights from ITC The hot topic at this week’s International Test Conference (ITC) was tackling silent data corruption, with panel discussions, papers, and Google’s Parthasarathy Ranganathan’s keynote address all emphasizing the urgency of the issue. In the past two years Meta, Google, and Microsoft have reported on silent errors, errors not detected at test, which are adversely impact... » read more

Toward Domain-Specific EDA


More companies appear to be creating custom EDA tools, but it is not clear if this trend is accelerating and what it means for the mainstream EDA industry. Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. Change can come from new abstractions, new options for optimization, or new limitations that are imposed on a tool or flow. For example, the slowing of Moore's Law means that sufficient prog... » read more

Progress In Quantum Computing


A recent wave of quantum computing investment has given rise to claims of a quantum computing bubble, based on overly optimistic technological claims in a field area that experts say has yet to demonstrate any real utility. But executives on the industry’s front lines say quantum computing is indeed a commercially viable technology, albeit one that is at least several years away from overcomi... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


President Biden signed an executive order on Sept. 15, limiting foreign investments in U.S. technology by "competitor or adversarial nations" that are deemed a threat to national security. In the past, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) largely limited its actions to the sale of U.S. companies. The new directive expands that to include investments involving "U.S. s... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence unveiled a big data analytics infrastructure to unify massive data sets across all Cadence computational software. The Joint Enterprise Data and AI (JedAI) Platform aims to optimize multiple runs of multiple engines across an entire SoC design and verification flow. It combines data from its AI-driven Cerebrus implementation and Optimality system optimization solutions, along with the n... » read more

How To Compare Chips


Traditional metrics for semiconductors are becoming much less meaningful in the most advanced designs. The number of transistors packed into a square centimeter only matters if they can be utilized, and performance per watt is irrelevant if sufficient power cannot be delivered to all of the transistors. The consensus across the chip industry is that the cost per transistor is rising at each ... » read more

Keyword Transformer: A Self-Attention Model For Keyword Spotting


The Transformer architecture has been successful across many domains, including natural language processing, computer vision and speech recognition. In keyword spotting, self-attention has primarily been used on top of convolutional or recurrent encoders. We investigate a range of ways to adapt the Transformer architecture to keyword spotting and introduce the Keyword Transformer (KWT), a fully... » read more

Security Verification Of An Open-Source Hardware Root Of Trust


By Jason Oberg and Dominic Rizzo OpenTitan is a powerful open-source silicon root of trust project, designed from scratch as a transparent, trustworthy, and secure implementation for enterprises, platform providers, and chip manufacturers. It includes numerous hardware security features ranging from secure boot and remote attestation to secure storage of private user data. The open-source de... » read more

MicroLEDs Move Toward Commercialization


The market for MicroLED displays is heating up, fueled by a raft of innovations in design and manufacturing that can increase yield and reduce prices, making them competitive with LCD and OLED devices. MicroLED displays are brighter and higher contrast than their predecessors, and they are more efficient. Functional prototypes have been developed for watches, AR glasses, TVs, signage, and au... » read more

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