Chip Industry Week In Review


Worldwide silicon wafer shipments declined nearly 2.7% to 12,266 million square inches in 2024, with wafer revenue contracting 6.5% to $11.5 billion, according to the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group. CSIS released a new report, “Critical Minerals and the Future of the U.S. Economy,” with detailed analysis and policy recommendations for building a secure mineral supply chain for semicond... » read more

Rowhammer Mitigation With Adaptive Refresh Management Optimization (KAIST, Sk hynix)


A new technical paper titled "Securing DRAM at Scale: ARFM-Driven Row Hammer Defense with Unveiling the Threat of Short tRC Patterns" was published by researchers at KAIST and Sk hynix. Abstract (partial) "To address the issue of powerful row hammer (RH) attacks, our study involved an extensive analysis of the prevalent attack patterns in the field. We discovered a strong correlation betwee... » read more

Med Tech Morphs Into Consumer Wearables


Doctors have been using advanced technology for years, but the growing trend is for consumers to use devices at home and have direct access to their data. Watches and rings that were once primarily used for counting steps or registering sleep patterns can now read blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen, body temperature, and other early signs of illness. Meanwhile, various patches are under d... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 20


Self-correcting memristor array Researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), and Yonsei University developed a memristor-based neuromorphic chip that can learn and correct errors, enabling it to adapt to immediate environmental changes. The system c... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is ramping up R&D for next-gen EUV and plasma-based particle sources, aiming to increase the EUV laser source power by an order of magnitude while also making it more energy-efficient. Specifically, the goal is to replace today's CO2-based laser with a solid-state laser, using a thulium-doped yttrium lithium fluoride medium to increase the laser's powe... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Dec. 23


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=394 /] Find all technical papers here. » read more

Fully Partitioned Security Monitoring Logic From Both The CPU’s Main Core and Privileged SW (KAIST)


A new technical paper titled "Interstellar: Fully Partitioned and Efficient Security Monitoring Hardware Near a Processor Core for Protecting Systems against Attacks on Privileged Software" was published by researchers at KAIST. The paper states "The existing approaches to instruction trace-based security monitoring hardware are dependent on the privileged software, which presents a signific... » read more

Baby Steps Toward 3D DRAM


Flash memory has made incredible capacity strides thanks to monolithic 3D processing enabled by the stacking of more than 200 layers, which is on its way to 1.000 layers in future generations.[1] But the equally important DRAM has achieved a similar manufacturable 3D architecture. The need for a sufficiently large means of storing charge — such as a capacitor — has proved elusive. Severa... » read more

HBM Options Increase As AI Demand Soars


High-bandwidth memory (HBM) sales are spiking as the amount of data that needs to be processed quickly by state-of-the-art AI accelerators, graphic processing units, and high-performance computing applications continues to explode. HBM inventories are sold out, driven by massive efforts and investments in developing and improving large language models such as ChatGPT. HBM is the memory of ch... » read more

New Tradeoffs In Leading-Edge Chip Design


Device design begins with the anticipated workload. What is it actually supposed to do? What resources — computational units, memory, sensors — are available? Answering these questions and developing the functional architecture are the first steps in a new design — well before committing it to silicon, said Tim Kogel, senior director of technical product management at Synopsys. Yet eve... » read more

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