Security Power Requirements Are Growing


Determining how much power to budget for security in a chip design is a complex calculation. It starts with a risk assessment of the cost of a breach and the number of possible attack vectors, and whether security is active or passive. Different forms of root of trust and cryptography have different power costs. Different systems could require tradeoffs between performance and security, whic... » read more

AI Drives Re-Engineering Of Nearly Everything In Chips


AI's ability to mine patterns across massive quantities of data is causing fundamental changes in how chips are used, how they are designed, and how they are packaged and built. These shifts are especially apparent in high-performance AI architectures being used inside of large data centers, where chiplets are being deployed to process, move, and store massive amounts of data. But they also ... » read more

Reap Rewards With Shift-Left Pattern Matching For Custom And AMS Designs


To keep up with the growing complexities of IC design, major semiconductor companies are adopting shift-left strategies. For verification, this means pulling much of the work into the physical design stage. By moving critical checks earlier in the design cycle, you can identify and resolve issues before they escalate, streamlining the overall development process. The Calibre tools have been ... » read more

New Ways To Improve EDA Productivity


EDA vendors are taking aim at new ways to improve the productivity of design and verification engineers, who are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in chip complexity in tight time-to-market windows and with constrained engineering talent pipelines. In the past, progress often was as straightforward as improving algorithms or parallelizing computations in a linear flow. But w... » read more

Analog Creates Ripples in Digital Verification


We live in an analog world, but analog has been minimized whenever possible. At some point digital and analog must come together in every electronic device, and that has long been an area where errors creep in. The Wilson Research Group and Siemens EDA functional verification study has long shown that analog and mixed signal are two of the highest causes of flaws that result in chip respins.... » read more

Need For Speed Drives Targeted Testing


As packaging complexity increases and nodes shrink, defect detection becomes significantly more difficult. Engineers must contend with subtle variations introduced during fabrication and assembly without sacrificing throughput. New material stacks degrade signal-to-noise ratios, which makes metrology more difficult. At the same time, inspection systems face a more nuanced challenge — how t... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


[Podcast version is here.] TSMC said it will produce 30% of its leading-edge chips in Arizona when all six of its fabs are operational, a total investment of $165 billion, Axios reported. In its latest SEC filing, the foundry said it continues to add capacity in Taiwan, Arizona, Japan, and Germany. The Trump administration launched a Section 232 investigation into semiconductors and relat... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 16


Siemens’ Tova Levy finds that heterogeneous integration necessitates a shift to a system-level technology co-optimization approach where power, performance, area, cost, and reliability are considered across various components, including silicon, package, interposer, and PCB. Synopsys’ Greg Sorber listens in as Arm’s Rene Haas and Synopsys’ Sassine Ghazi discuss the opportunity for AI... » read more

AI Agents Need Goals


Experts At The Table: Definitions and goals matter when it comes to using AI effectively, and it has to be tightly reined in to be effective. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts to discuss these issues and others, including Johannes Stahl, senior director of product line management for the Systems Design Group at Synopsys; Michael Young, director of product marketing for ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Don't have time to read this? Check out Semiconductor Engineering's Inside Chips podcast.  The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating TSMC for potential export control violations involving Huawei chips, reports Reuters. The probe follows TechInsights' teardown of a Huawei AI accelerator chip last year. The foundry, meanwhile, maintains it has not shipped any chips to Huawei since 2020... » read more

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