Chip Industry Week in Review


China's Xiaomi debuted an in-house-designed 10-core mobile SoC built on a 3nm process. The company did not identify the foundry. It also announced plans to invest 50 billion yuan (~$7B) over the next decade to develop high-end smartphone chips, as part of a 200 billion yuan (~$28B) core technology investment over the next five years. Kearney and SEMI released a report assessing the state of ... » read more

Research Bits: May 13


Benchmarking 3D-IC cooling Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and HRL Laboratories developed a specialized chip to test and validate cooling solutions for packaged chip stacks. The chip dissipates extremely high power, generating heat through the silicon layer and in localized hot spots to mimic high-performance logic chips. It then uses diodes to measure temperatu... » read more

Research Bits: April 22


PIC heterogeneous integration Researchers from Hewlett Packard Labs, Indian Institutes of Technology Madras, Microsoft Research, and University of Michigan built an AI acceleration platform based on heterogeneously integrated photonic ICs. The PIC combines silicon photonics along with III-V compound semiconductors that functionally integrate lasers and optical amplifiers to reduce optical l... » read more

Research Bits: Mar. 18


High-frequency signal conversion Researchers from ETH Zurich developed a plasmonic modulator capable of converting electrical signals into optical signals with a frequency of over a terahertz. The modulator is a tiny nanostructure made up of various materials, including gold, and makes use of the interaction between light and free electrons within the gold. It converts signals directly, red... » read more

Thermally Aware Chiplet Placement Algorithm Based on Automatic Differentiation (MIT, IBM)


A new technical paper titled "DiffChip: Thermally Aware Chip Placement with Automatic Differentiation" was published by researchers at MIT and IBM. Abstract "Chiplets are modular integrated circuits that can be combined to form a larger system, offering flexibility and performance enhancements. However, their dense packing often leads to significant thermal management challenges, requiring ... » read more

Research Bits: Mar. 4


Fiber computer Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University developed a programmable elastic fiber computer that could be woven into clothing to monitor health conditions and physical activity. Clothing created using the fiber computer was reported as comfortable and machine washable. The single elastic fiber computer cont... » read more

SW-HW Co-Design Mitigation To Strengthen ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks (MIT)


A technical paper titled "Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks" was published by researchers at MIT. Abstract "Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is one of the most prominently deployed mitigations against memory corruption attacks. ASLR randomly shuffles program virtual addresses to prevent attackers from knowing the location of program contents in memory. Microa... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 13


High-temp electrochemical memory Researchers from the University of Michigan and Sandia National Laboratory propose a nonvolatile electrochemical memory that can store and rewrite information at temperatures over 1100°F (600°C), enabling it to continue working in environments as extreme as the surface of Venus. Instead of transporting electrons, the memory moves oxygen ions between layere... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 24


Growing multilayered chips Researchers from MIT, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Sungkyunkwan University, and University of Texas at Dallas developed a method to fabricate a multilayered chip with alternating layers of semiconducting material grown directly on top of each other. The approach enables high-performance transistors and memory and logic elements on any random crystalline ... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 11


Photonic AI processor Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Enosemi, and Periplous developed a fully integrated photonic processor that can perform all the key computations of a deep neural network optically on the chip. The chip is fabricated using commercial foundry processes and uses three layers of devices that perform linear and nonlinear operations. A particula... » read more

← Older posts