Chip Industry Week In Review


Don't have time to read this? Check out Semiconductor Engineering's Inside Chips podcast.  The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating TSMC for potential export control violations involving Huawei chips, reports Reuters. The probe follows TechInsights' teardown of a Huawei AI accelerator chip last year. The foundry, meanwhile, maintains it has not shipped any chips to Huawei since 2020... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Check out our new Inside Chips podcast. President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were announced this week. The executive order stated that semiconductors and copper imports are not directly subject to the reciprocal tariff, although the exemption may be short-lived. Semiconductor equipment and tools were not mentioned, leaving the industry searching for clarification. Regardless, hig... » read more

Auto Sector Leads The Way In IC Security


Concerns about chip and system security are beginning to bear fruit in some markets, driven by the overlap in safety and security in automotive applications and the growing value of algorithms and complex systems in others. But how and when that security is implemented is still all over the map, and so is its effectiveness. The reasons are as nuanced as the designs themselves, which makes it... » read more

Chip Aging Opens Up New Attack Vectors


The longer a piece of silicon is out in the field the more prone it becomes to a cyberattack, raising questions about the optimal longevity of circuits and the impact of extending their lifetimes. This is particularly challenging for safety- and mission-critical applications, where the cost of development can run as high as $100 million for some of the most complex designs. Chipmakers want t... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 2


Synopsys’ Meenakshy Ramachandran explores how DisplayPort Automotive Extensions help meet functional safety and security standards for the increasingly higher-resolution and more immersive in-vehicle displays in connected, autonomous, shared, and electric vehicles. Siemens’ Gabriella Leone and Michael Munsey discuss the need for a collaborative semiconductor business platform and how to ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


McKinsey issued a new report on the state of the chemical supply chain for semiconductors in the U.S., citing potential shortages of high-purity materials such as tungsten, aluminum and copper, lack of access to CMP slurries and photoresists for EUV, and rising competition for high-k precursors that can fetch higher prices outside of the U.S. CSIS weighed in on the U.S. goverment's recent ... » read more

Innovating For 6G


As the world eagerly anticipates the arrival of applicable 6G innovations, researchers face numerous challenges in validating this next-generation wireless communication technology. The journey from theoretical concepts and mathematical equations to real-world 6G implementation is complex and requires meticulous planning, testing, and measurements to better characterize these ultra-high freque... » read more

Challenges In Managing Chiplet Resources


Managing chiplet resources is emerging as a significant and multi-faceted challenge as chiplets expand beyond the proprietary designs of large chipmakers and interact with other elements in a package or system. Poor resource management in chiplets adds an entirely new dimension to the usual power, performance, and area tradeoffs. It can lead to performance bottlenecks, because as chiplets co... » read more

Dynamic Characterization Of A Power Semiconductor Bare Chip


Power semiconductor devices are used in a variety of forms, such as being packaged in Surface Mount Devices (SMDs) or power modules, and they find broad applications. Power semiconductor bare chips are loaded into these packages. It is desirable to characterize the bare chip before placing it in a package or a power module to expedite development. However, the small size, fragile structure, and... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 26


Siemens' Bianca Ward argues that sustainability must be considered starting from the design phase to reduce the energy consumption of ICs as well as the production processes used to manufacture them. Synopsys' Adrien Tozzoli looks at how physical optics simulation can be improved by using beam synthesis propagation, a method that decomposes the optical field into a collection of beamlets to ... » read more

← Older posts