Power Models For Machine Learning


AI and machine learning are being designed into just about everything, but the chip industry lacks sufficient tools to gauge how much power and energy an algorithm is using when it runs on a particular hardware platform. The missing information is a serious limiter for energy-sensitive devices. As the old maxim goes, you can't optimize what you can't measure. Today, the focus is on functiona... » read more

Waking And Sleeping Create Current Transients


Silicon power-saving techniques are helping to reduce the power required by data centers and other high-intensity computing environments, but they’ve also added a significant challenge for design teams. As islands on high-powered chips go to sleep and wake up, the current requirements change quickly. This happens in a few microseconds, at most. The rapid change of loading creates a challen... » read more

An Integrated Approach To Power Domain And Clock Domain Crossing Verification


Reducing power consumption is essential for both mobile and data center applications. The challenge is to lower power while minimally impacting performance. The solution has been to partition designs into multiple power domains which allow selectively reducing voltage levels or powering off partitions. Traditional low power verification validates only the functional correctness of power control... » read more

The Next Big Leap: Energy Optimization


The relationship between power and energy is technically simple, but its implication on the EDA flow is enormous. There are no tools or flows today that allow you to analyze, implement, and optimize a design for energy consumption, and getting to that point will require a paradigm shift within the semiconductor industry. The industry talks a lot about power, and power may have become a more ... » read more

The Next Phase Of Computing


Apple's new M1 chip offers a glimpse of what's ahead, and not just from Apple. Being able to get 18 to 20 hours of battery life from a laptop computer moves the ball much farther down the field in semiconductor design. All of this is entirely dependent on the applications, of course. But what's important here is how much battery life and performance can be gained by designing hardware specif... » read more

Dealing With Sub-Threshold Variation


Chipmakers are pushing into sub-threshold operation in an effort to prolong battery life and reduce energy costs, adding a whole new set of challenges for design teams. While process and environmental variation long have been concerns for advanced silicon process nodes, most designs operate in the standard “super-threshold” regime. Sub-threshold designs, in contrast, have unique variatio... » read more

Difficult Memory Choices In AI Systems


The number of memory choices and architectures is exploding, driven by the rapid evolution in AI and machine learning chips being designed for a wide range of very different end markets and systems. Models for some of these systems can range in size from 10 billion to 100 billion parameters, and they can vary greatly from one chip or application to the next. Neural network training and infer... » read more

Faster Inferencing At The Edge


Cheng Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, talks about inferencing at the edge, what are some of the main considerations in designing and choosing an inferencing chip, why programmability and modularity are important, and how hardware-software co-design with algorithms can improve performance and power. » read more

Speeding Up AI With Vector Instructions


A search is underway across the industry to find the best way to speed up machine learning applications, and optimizing hardware for vector instructions is gaining traction as a key element in that effort. Vector instructions are a class of instructions that enable parallel processing of data sets. An entire array of integers or floating point numbers is processed in a single operation, elim... » read more

Security Tradeoffs In Chips And AI Systems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the cost and effectiveness of security in chip architectures and AI systems with with Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist at Ansys; Jason Oberg, CTO and co-founder of Tortuga Logic; Pamela Norton, CEO and founder of Borsetta; Ron Perez, fellow and technical lead for security architecture at Intel; and Tim Whitfield, vice president of s... » read more

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