Software In Inference Accelerators


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about the importance of hardware-software co-design for inference accelerators, how that affects performance and power, and what new approaches chipmakers are taking to bring AI chips to market. » read more

Analog Simulation At 7/5/3nm


Hany Elhak, group director of product management at Cadence, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about analog circuit simulation at advanced nodes, why process variation is an increasing problem, the impact of parasitics and finFET stacking, and what happens when gate-all-around FETs are added into the chip. » read more

Verdi Transaction Debug Solution: Unified Performance Analysis And Debug For Interconnect


In modern systems on chip (SoCs), where Arm AMBA protocols are intensively used as standard intellectual property (IP) interfaces, the interconnect is usually required to bridge and facilitate the communication between many different IP interfaces. The interconnect presents one of the biggest challenges of SoC verification, considering the different kinds of protocol interfaces, conversion of d... » read more

Accelerating Chiplets With 112G XSR SerDes PHYs


The fading of Moore’s Law and an almost exponential increase in data is challenging the semiconductor industry as never before. Indeed, zettabytes of data are constantly generated by a wide range of devices including IoT endpoints such as vehicles, wearables, smartphones and appliances. Moreover, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications are adding new ... » read more

Interconnect Prominence In Fail-Operational Architectures


When we in the semiconductor world think about safety, we think about ISO 26262, FMEDA and safety mechanisms like redundancy, ECC and lock-step operation. Once we have that covered, any other aspect of safety is somebody else’s problem, right? Sadly no, for us at least. As we push towards higher levels of autonomy, SAE levels 3 and above, we’re integrating more functionality into our SoCs, ... » read more

Memory Architectures In AI: One Size Doesn’t Fit All


In the world of regular computing, we are used to certain ways of architecting for memory access to meet latency, bandwidth and power goals. These have evolved over many years to give us the multiple layers of caching and hardware cache-coherency management schemes which are now so familiar. Machine learning (ML) has introduced new complications in this area for multiple reasons. AI/ML chips ca... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Nvidia will acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion in cash, the largest deal in the chipmaker's history. Traditionally a PC GPU company, Nvidia has made a push into high-performance computing, particularly for AI workloads. Founded in 1999, Israel-based Mellanox focuses on end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. According to Nvidia, Me... » read more

The Race To Multi-Domain SoCs


K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris IP, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the impact of automotive and AI on chip design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What do you see as the biggest changes over the next 12 to 24 months? Janac: There are segments of the semiconductor market that are shrinking, such as DTV and simple IoT. Others are going ... » read more

Keeping Up Power And Performance With Cobalt


Chip designers require simultaneous improvements in “PPAC”: power, performance and area/cost (Fig. 1). Achieving these improvements is becoming increasingly difficult as classic Moore's Law scaling slows. What's needed is a new playbook for the industry consisting of new materials, new architectures, new 3D structures within the chip, new methods to shrink feature geometries, and advanced p... » read more

Data Transfer Without Energy Loss


SEMI met with Erez Halahmi, vice president at 0eC SA, to discuss a new way to transfer information not only between chips but also between servers to reduce power consumption while boosting performance. The two spoke ahead of his presentation at the 3D & Systems Summit, 28-30 January, 2019, in Dresden, Germany. To register for the event, please click here. SEMI: What is Zero energy co... » read more

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