Will Open-Source Work For Chips?

By Brian Bailey - 30 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 2

Open source is getting a second look by the semiconductor industry, driven by the high cost of design at complex nodes along with fragmentation in end markets, which increasingly means that one size or approach no longer fits all. The open source movement, as we know it today, started in the 1980s with the launch of the GNU project, which was about the time the electronic design automation (... » read more

Data Analytics To Drive IC Shift

By Paula Doe - 28 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

The adoption of predictive analytics has the potential to drive the next round of IC industry innovation and growth. Much of the necessary data handling technology is now available from other sectors. However, to fully capitalize on the possibilities, the IC manufacturing world faces particular challenges in figuring out how to get a high yield of actionable information from its streams of vari... » read more

CPU, GPU, or FPGA?

By Jeff Dorsch - 16 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080 gaming graphics card is a piece of work. Employing the company’s Pascal architecture and featuring chips made with a 16nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFET"] process, the GTX 1080’s GP104 graphics processing units boast 7.2 billion transistors, running at 1.6 GHz, and it can be overclocked to 1.733 GHz. The die size is 314 mm², 21% smaller than its GeForce ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 12

By Jesse Allen - 12 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 0

Digital storage in DNA Computer scientists and electrical engineers from University of Washington and Microsoft detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies. Progress in DNA storage has been rapid: in 1999, the state-of-the-art in DN... » read more

Oh, The Hypocrisy

By Ernest Worthman - 03 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 1

It's almost impossible to find anyone hasn’t heard about the privacy case chest-thumping going on between Apple and the FBI, as well as a few other federal entities. And by now the interview with Tim Cook and David Muir is quite public, as well. So how come, all of a sudden, Apple, Microsoft (although Bill Gates did come out on the government side) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and countless ot... » read more

Battle Looms Over Mobile Payments

By Ernest Worthman - 03 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 0

The lines are drawn. The sides are sizing each other up. Apple is on one side with secure element, and Google and Microsoft are on the other side with host card emulation. Both are mobile payment systems for smartphones that rely on near-field communication technology. Apple fired the first shot with SE, and Google soon replied with HCE. And now both sides are ramping up after months of dela... » read more

Why Power Modeling Is So Difficult

By Ed Sperling - 15 Feb, 2016 - Comments: 2

Power modeling has been talked about for years and promoted by EDA vendors and chipmakers as an increasingly important tool for advanced designs. But unlike hardware and software modeling, which have been proven to speed time to market for multiple generations of silicon, power modeling has some unique problems that are more difficult to solve. Despite continued development in this field, po... » read more

What Is Cyberwarfare?

By Ernest Worthman - 08 Feb, 2016 - Comments: 1

Cyberwarfare is emerging as the most sophisticated battleground of the 21st century. In fact, the military in all major countries make it a priority. Collectively they are spending tens of billions of dollars on education and building a knowledgebase of how attacks can be perpetrated and what defenses are needed. The entire effort is based on technology, both legacy and new, starting on the ... » read more

Executive Insight: Paul Kocher

By Ed Sperling - 04 Feb, 2016 - Comments: 0

Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Rambus' Cryptography Research Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the state of security today and how it will be affected as more devices are connected. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The number of vulnerabilities is increasing. Are we making progress? Kocher: If your metric for progress is the... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 5

By Jesse Allen - 05 Jan, 2016 - Comments: 0

A foggy consortium Scientists at Princeton University, ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft formed a global effort to develop architectures and tools to further "fog computing" and networks, which aim to harness connected devices' own computing, sensing and storage power to form edge networks that meet most of the demand of user devices that are at the periphery of a more centralized netwo... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

Legacy Process Nodes Going Strong

The critical, and growing, significance of mature node chips and processes.

by Bryon Moyer

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?