Making Better Use Of Memory In AI


Steven Woo, Rambus fellow and distinguished inventor, talks about using number formats to extend memory bandwidth, what the impact can be on fractional precision, how modifications of precision can play into that without sacrificing accuracy, and what role stochastic rounding can play. » read more

Breaking Down The AI Memory Wall


Over the past few decades, the semiconductor industry has witnessed the rapid evolution of memory technology as new memories helped to usher in new usage models that characterized each decade. For example, synchronous memory helped drive the personal computer (PC) revolution in the 1990s, and this was quickly followed by specialized graphics memory (GPUs) for game consoles in the 2000s. When sm... » read more

Advantages Of LPDDR5: A New Clocking Scheme


Earlier this year, JEDEC released the new standard, JESD209–5, Low Power Double Data Rate 5 (LPDDR5). Those that contributed to the development of the standard come from a diverse technology background and represent both manufacturers and consumers of SDRAM memories. Now we have a new memory standard to help enable the future that requires more compute power, higher reliability, and lower pow... » read more

EDA Gears Up For 3D


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit of ANSYS; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Bus... » read more

Breaking The AI Memory Bottleneck


In the long unfolding arc of technology innovation, artificial intelligence (AI) looms as immense. In its quest to mimic human behavior, the technology touches energy, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, construction, transportation and nearly every other imaginable industry – a defining role that promises to fast track the fourth Industrial Revolution. And if the industry orac... » 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

Do Superconducting Processors Really Need Cryogenic Memories? The Case For Cold DRAM


Cryogenic, superconducting digital processors offer the promise of greatly reduced operating power for server-class computing systems. This is due to the exceptionally low energy per operation of Single Flux Quantum circuits built from Josephson junction devices operating at the temperature of 4 Kelvin. Unfortunately, no suitable same-temperature memory technology yet exists to complement thes... » read more

AI Inference Memory System Tradeoffs


When companies describe their AI inference chip they typically give TOPS but don’t talk about their memory system, which is equally important. What is TOPS? It means Trillions or Tera Operations per Second. It is primarily a measure of the maximum achievable throughput but not a measure of actual throughput. Most operations are MACs (multiply/accumulates), so TOPS = (number of MAC units) x... » read more

Cloudy Outlook Seen For IC Biz


After a slowdown in the first half of 2019, chipmakers and equipment vendors face a cloudy outlook for the second half of this year, with a possible recovery in 2020. Generally, the semiconductor industry began to see a slowdown starting in mid- to late-2018, which extended into the first half of 2019. During the first half of this year, memory and non-memory vendors were negatively impacted... » read more

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