Fast LFD Flows With Pattern Matching And Machine Learning Can Deliver Higher-Yielding Designs Faster


By Wael ElManhawy and Joe Kwan A lithographic (litho) hotspot is a defect on a wafer that is created during manufacturing by a combination of systematic process variation and resolution enhancement technology (RET) limitations. Litho hotspots typically represent severe yield detractors, so detecting and eliminating potential litho hotspots prior to manufacturing is crucial to achieving a com... » read more

Synthesizing Hardware From Software


The ability to automatically generate optimized hardware from software was one of the primary tenets of system-level design automation that was never fully achieved. The question now is whether that will ever happen, and whether it is just a matter of having the right technology or motivation to make it possible. While high-level synthesis (HLS) did come out of this work and has proven to be... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 20


Making carbon nanotubes with AI Russia’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) has developed a method to monitor the growth of carbon nanotubes using an artificial intelligence (AI) technology called machine learning. Skoltech used AI to predict the performance of the synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotubes using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. The tec... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services Arm released a survey of 650 industry representatives about eSIM and iSIM technology. Ninety percent of the respondents were aware of eSIM, while 43% were unaware of iSIM. Vincent Korstanje, vice president and general manager, Emerging Businesses at Arm, cites the leading three obstacles to large commercial deployments: Resistance from traditional stakeholders (69% of respond... » read more

Why Scaling Must Continue


The entire semiconductor industry has come to the realization that the economics of scaling logic are gone. By any metric—price per transistor, price per watt, price per unit area of silicon—the economics are no longer in the plus column. So why continue? The answer is more complicated than it first appears. This isn't just about inertia and continuing to miniaturize what was proven in t... » read more

The Next New Memories


Several next-generation memory types are ramping up after years of R&D, but there are still more new memories in the research pipeline. Today, several next-generation memories, such as MRAM, phase-change memory (PCM) and ReRAM, are shipping to one degree or another. Some of the next new memories are extensions of these technologies. Others are based on entirely new technologies or involve ar... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 13


Keeping tabs on crops University of Missouri researchers collaborated with the Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture on pairing a regular digital camera with a miniature infrared camera for a novel system providing temperature data and detailed images of crops. “Using an infrared camera to monitor crop temperature can be tricky because it is difficult to diff... » read more

Debug Tools Are Improving


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss debugging complex SoCs with Randy Fish, vice president of strategic accounts and partnerships for UltraSoC; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Mark Olen, senior product marketing manager for Mentor, a Siemens Business; and Dominik Strasser, vice president of engineering for OneSpin Solutions. Part one can be found here. Part two... » read more

Optimizing Power For Learning At The Edge


Learning on the edge is seen as one of the Holy Grails of machine learning, but today even the cloud is struggling to get computation done using reasonable amounts of power. Power is the great enabler—or limiter—of the technology, and the industry is beginning to respond. "Power is like an inverse pyramid problem," says Johannes Stahl, senior director of product marketing at Synopsys. "T... » read more

HBM2E: The E Stands for Evolutionary


Samsung introduced the first memory products in March that conform to JEDEC’s HBM2E specification, but so far nothing has come to market—a reflection of just how difficult it is to manufacture this memory in volume. Samsung’s new HBM2E (sold under the Flashbolt brand name, versus the older Aquabolt and Flarebolt brands), offers 33% better performance over HBM2 thanks to doubling the de... » read more

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