Chip Industry Week In Review


Computex in Taiwan: Arm and Nvidia introduced an AI PC platform, RTX Spark, with an Arm-based Grace CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory. Cadence announced a fully autonomous virtual agentic AI design engineer, enabling customers to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows. Intel launched Xeon 6+, its first data-center CPU built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The company... » read more

Moving Intelligence Closer to the Sensor Edge (IBM Research)


A researcher from IBM Research - Europe published “Emerging Trends in Intelligent Sensing”. Abstract “The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence, connected devices, and high speed mobile networks is driving unprecedented computational demands that challenge traditional sensor architectures. This article explores the shift toward edge computing, where computation is perfor... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Jun. 2


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Physical Foundation Models: Fixed HW implementations of large-scale neural networks 🔗 Yale University, Cornell University, Boston University, NTT Research Understanding Inference Scaling for LLMs: Bottlenecks, Trade-offs, and Performance Princip... » read more

An Agent-Driven End-to-End HW-SW Co-Design Benchmark for Heterogeneous SoCs (Columbia, IBM)


Researchers from Columbia University and IBM Research have released “HSCO-Bench: An Agent-Driven End-to-End Hardware-Software Co-design Benchmark for Systems-on-Chip”. Abstract “Large language models (LLMs) are adopted for software and hardware design, yet these domains are still evaluated separately. Software benchmarks typically assume fixed hardware targets, while hardware be... » read more

AI Accelerator Testing Depends On DFT Innovations


Key Takeaways: I/O and lane repair capabilities are becoming critical to improving yield. System-level testing catches marginal defects and rare defects such as silent data corruption errors. Synopsys and TSMC developed a multi-die demo vehicle capable of full test, monitor, debug, and repair capability across the system’s lifecycle. The proliferation of accelerators in AI... » read more

GPU Power Prediction Tool for AI Workloads (MIT, IBM)


A new technical paper, "EnergAIzer: Fast and Accurate GPU Power Estimation Framework for AI Workloads," was published by researchers at MIT and IBM Research. Abstract "As AI workloads drive increases in datacenter power consumption, accurate GPU power estimation is critical for proactive power management. However, existing power models face a scalability bottleneck not in the modeling tec... » read more

Research Bits: May 5


AI power prediction Researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a prediction tool that can quickly tell data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. It can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations. The lightweight estimation model captures the power usage pattern of a GP... » read more

AI Accelerators Usher In New Era For IC Test


Key Takeaways The parallelism in AI accelerators enables low latency but complicates failure isolation. HBM can account for 50% of package cost, so known-good stack assurance is critical. DFT and test cooperate to solve final test, singulated die test, SLT, and in-system test for data centers. AI accelerators are used for everything from training large language models to mak... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The IEEE ISSCC conference was held this week in San Francisco. Among the highlights: IBM detailed an AI accelerator based on its new inferencing dataflow architecture. CEA-Leti presented a chip-scale, ultra-fast, battery-operated EPR spectrometer. QuTech introduced a cryo-CMOS SoC with NV centers in diamond. UTokyo showed its low-jitter PLL architecture for beyond 5G/6G. Imec d... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Dec. 16


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=501 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here and in the most recent Chip Industry Week in Review. » read more

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