CXL Picks Up Steam In Data Centers


CXL is gaining traction inside large data centers as a way of boosting utilization of different compute elements, such as memories and accelerators, while minimizing the need for additional racks of servers. But the standard is being extended and modified so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with all the changes, each of which needs to be verified and validated across a growing swath of h... » read more

Collaboration Widens Among Big Chip Companies


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing need for collaboration among equipment and tools vendors, the impact of systems companies and increases in complexity, and how to handle a push for more customization while controlling costs, with Martin van den Brink, president and CTO of ASML; Luc Van den Hove, CEO of imec; David Fried, vice president of computati... » read more

Screening For Silent Data Errors


Engineers are beginning to understand the causes of silent data errors (SDEs) and the data center failures they cause, both of which can be reduced by increasing test coverage and boosting inspection on critical layers. Silent data errors are so named because if engineers don’t look for them, then they don’t know they exist. Unlike other kinds of faulty behaviors, these errors also can c... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Top Of The News Google announced it will support the RISC-V architecture with the Android open-source operating system. In a keynote at the RISC-V Summit, Lars Bergstrom, Google's director of engineering for the Android Platform Programming Languages, noted that Android currently has more than 3 billion users and the support of more than 24,000 vendors. "We've been following RISC-V for a very ... » read more

Shifting Toward Software-Defined Vehicles


Apple reportedly is developing a software-defined vehicle. But so are Renault, Hyundai, General Motors, and just about everyone else. Some of the benefits of SDVs include increased comfort, convenience, safety, reliability, and remote software and firmware updates. Preventive and predictive maintenance, and remote diagnostics, can be done more conveniently over the air, while vehicle behavio... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Dec. 20


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=71 /] If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a good fit for our global audience. At a minimum, papers need to be well researched and documented, relevant to the semiconductor ecosystem, and free of marketing bias. There is no cost involved for us po... » read more

Hardware Fuzzing (U. of Michigan, Google, Virginia Tech)


A technical paper titled "Fuzzing Hardware Like Software" was published by researchers at University of Michigan, Google and Virginia Tech. The paper was presented at the 2022 Usenix Security Symposium. Abstract: "Hardware flaws are permanent and potent: hardware cannot be patched once fabricated, and any flaws may undermine even formally verified software executing on top. Consequently, ve... » read more

Leveraging Multi-Agent RL for Microprocessor Design Space (Harvard, Google)


A new technical paper titled "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Microprocessor Design Space Exploration" was published by researchers at Harvard University and Google research groups. Abstract "Microprocessor architects are increasingly resorting to domain-specific customization in the quest for high-performance and energy-efficiency. As the systems grow in complexity, fine-tuning arch... » read more

Startup Funding: November 2022


November was a month for mega-rounds, with ten companies receiving investments of at least $100 million. One of those is a startup providing connectivity solutions for data centers and enabling use of the memory pooling functionality in the latest update to the CXL standard. Two quantum computer startups were part of the $100M+ club this month — one using very cold atoms to take on not only q... » read more

Why Matter 1.0 Really Matters


Incompatibilities of consumer devices inside the home are frustrating for consumers and a security risk. Skip Ashton, distinguished engineer at Infineon, talks about how the Matter 1.0 standard will fuse together different ecosystems from companies such as Apple, Google, and Amazon, how it will be applied to existing devices, what’s included and missing from the standard today, and how it can... » read more

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