Cure The Common Cold…


The technology sector has no equal in the ability of its people to visualize what might be possible and then make it happen fast. If we were sorting out the common cold, the sniffles may already have been relegated to the past. Maybe that’s a claim too far but while imagining the future has always been a feature of our world I think we’ve gone into overdrive in the last few years. From a... » read more

FinFET Metrology Challenges Grow


Chipmakers face a multitude of challenges in the fab at 10nm/7nm and beyond, but one technology that is typically under the radar is becoming especially difficult—metrology. Metrology, the art of measuring and characterizing structures, is used to pinpoint problems in devices and processes. It helps to ensure yields in both the lab and fab. At 28nm and above, metrology is a straightforward... » read more

Chipmakers Look Beyond Scaling


Gary Patton, CTO of GlobalFoundries, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the rollout of EUV, the rising cost of designing chips at the most advanced nodes, and the growing popularity of 22nm planar FD-SOI in a number of markets. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: You've just begun deploying EUV. Are you experiencing any issues? Patton: It's a very complicat... » read more

New Deep Learning Processors, Embedded FPGA Technologies, SoC Design Solutions


Some of the most valuable events at DAC are the IP Track sessions, which give small and midsize companies a chance to share innovations that might not get much attention elsewhere. The use of IP in SoCs has exploded in recent years. In a panel at DAC 2017, an industry expert noted that the IP market clearly was growing even faster than EDA itself, due to the fact that more and more chip mak... » read more

Higher Performance, Lower Power Everywhere


The future of technology is all about information—not just data—at our fingertips, anywhere and at any time. But making all of this work properly will require massive improvements in both performance and power efficiency. There are several distinct pieces to this picture. One is architectural, which is possibly the simplest to understand, the most technologically challenging to realize, ... » read more

Developing ASIL Ready SoCs For Self-Driving Cars


Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning using neural networks is a powerful technique for enabling advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and greater autonomy in vehicles. As AI research moves rapidly, designers are facing tough competition to provide efficient, flexible, and scalable silicon and software to handle deep learning automotive applications like inferencing in embedded vis... » read more

Where The Rubber Hits The Road: Implementing Machine Learning On Silicon


Machine learning (ML) is everywhere these days. The common thread between advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) vision applications in our cars and the voice (and now facial) recognition applications in our phones is that ML algorithms are doing the heavy lifting, or more accurately, the inferencing. In fact, neural networks (NN) can even be used in application spaces such as file compressi... » read more

System-Level Power Modeling Takes Root


Power, heat, and their combined effects on aging and reliability, are becoming increasingly critical variables in the design of chips that will be used across a variety of new and existing markets. As more processing moves to edge, where sensors are generating a tsunami of data, there are a number of factors that need to be considered in designs. On one side, power budgets need to reflect th... » read more

Does Power Verification Work?


Functional verification continues to evolve, but power verification—a somewhat new concern—remains at levels of sophistication reminiscent of functional verification 30 years ago. When will power verification catch up and what must to happen to make it possible? These are questions that the industry is still grappling with, and not everyone believes they require answers. Functional error... » read more

Mobile Machine Learning Hardware At Arm


Machine learning is playing an increasingly significant role in emerging mobile application domains such as AR/VR, ADAS, etc. Accordingly, hardware architects have designed customized hardware for machine learning algorithms, especially neural networks, to improve compute efficiency. However, machine learning is typically just one processing stage in complex end-to-end applications, which invol... » read more

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