Test Challenges Mount As Demands For Reliability Increase


An emphasis of improving semiconductor quality is beginning to spread well beyond just data centers and automotive applications, where ICs play a role in mission- and safety-critical applications. But this focus on improved reliability is ratcheting up pressure throughout the test community, from lab to fab and into the field, in products where transistor density continues to grow — and wh... » read more

Standards: The Next Step For Silicon Photonics


Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved. For the past three decades, photonics largely has been an enabler for high-speed communications, a lucrative market t... » read more

Automotive IoT Security By Design


A good example of the wider adoption and application of IoT devices is in automotive uses. It’s a growing market, with the worldwide number of IoT-connected devices projected to increase to 43 billion by 2023, an almost threefold increase from 2018. The modern vehicles that host so many IoT devices are increasingly connected—for cellular over-the-air updates, but also potentially to comm... » read more

Auto Cyberattacks Becoming More Widespread


As vehicles become smarter, more complex, and increasingly connected, they also become more prone to cyberattacks. The challenge now is to keep pace with hackers, who are continually devising new and innovative ways to attack both software and hardware in vehicles. Recent statistics bear this out. In 2022, there was a big spike in deep/dark web activity and incidents related to application p... » read more

Designing for Data Flow


Movement and management of data inside and outside of chips is becoming a central theme for a growing number of electronic systems, and a huge challenge for all of them. Entirely new architectures and techniques are being developed to reduce the movement of data and to accomplish more per compute cycle, and to speed the transfer of data between various components on a chip and between chips ... » read more

Design Challenges And Opportunities For Electric Powertrain With Vehicle Autonomy


According to recent studies, nearly 25% of all miles driven in the United States could be shared autonomous electrical vehicles (SAEVs) by 2030. Electric powertrain is indispensable for autonomous vehicles as it offers a) higher fuel efficiency and reduced CO2 emissions, b) an easier platform to support drive-by-wire systems needed for vehicle autonomy, and c) as battery prices keep dropping sh... » read more

Blog Review: March 1


Siemens EDA's Chris Spear explains the UVM Factory and how it can facilitate collaboration by enabling injection of new features without affecting your team. Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at efforts to ensure chiplets from different companies work together, particularly when the creating companies didn't pre-plan for those specific chiplets to work together, as well as the problems of failur... » read more

How To Build Resilience Into Chips


Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Ambarella will use Samsung's 5nm process technology for its new CV3-AD685 automotive AI central domain controller, bringing "new levels of AI acceleration, system integration and power efficiency to ADAS and L2+ through L4 autonomous vehicles.” Renesas introduced four technologies for automotive communication gateway SoCs: (1) an architecture that dynamically changes... » read more

Taming Corner Explosion In Complex Chips


There is a tenuous balance between the number of corners a design team must consider, the cost of analysis, and the margins they insert to deal with them, but that tradeoff is becoming a lot more difficult. If too many corners of a chip are explored, it might never see production. If not enough corners are explored, it could reduce yield. And if too much margin is added, the device may not be c... » read more

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