Overview: Ultra Ethernet’s Design and Architectural Advancements (ETH Zurich, Broadcom, HPE et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Ultra Ethernet's Design Principles and Architectural Innovations" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich, Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Intel, Microsoft, AMD and Cisco. Abstract "The recently released Ultra Ethernet (UE) 1.0 specification defines a transformative High-Performance Ethernet standard for future Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 19


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=465 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

LtRAM And StRAM: Specialized Memory Architectures Leveraging Workload-Specific Access Characteristics (Stanford, Microsoft)


A new technical paper titled "Towards Memory Specialization: A Case for Long-Term and Short-Term RAM" was published by researchers at Stanford University and Microsoft, and an independent researcher. Abstract "Both SRAM and DRAM have stopped scaling: there is no technical roadmap to reduce their cost (per byte/GB). As a result, memory now dominates system cost. This paper argues for a parad... » read more

Agentic AI: Lots Of Little Black Boxes


AI is changing so quickly that it's not always clear how much of a security threat it poses for semiconductor design, and that uncertainty increases as AI agents are introduced into the mix. So far, the use of AI in chip design has been highly targeted. Most of what is included in design tools is some version of machine learning, bounded by tight control loops. EDA and IP vendors, large chip... » read more

Security Tradeoffs: A Difficult Balance


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including new threat models from AI-based attacks, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Sieme... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: July 29


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=458 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Intel reported flat year-over year revenue for Q2, exceeding Wall Street's pessimistic expectations. In a message to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company will: Cut about 15% of its staff, ending the year with about 75,000 employees, down from a high of nearly 132,000 in 2022; Scrap projects in Poland and Germany, consolidate other sites in central America and Southeast Asia, and s... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government will grant licenses to NVIDIA and AMD to again sell some AI chips — NVIDIA's H20 GPU and AMD's MI308 — to Chinese companies. TrendForce projects that the availability of NVIDIA chips, in particular, will create a surge in demand from Chinese AI firms and cloud service providers, and boost high-bandwidth memory (HBM) consumption. The move could raise China’s share of... » read more

Data Center CPU Dominance Is Shifting To AMD And Arm


Fig. 1: Created by ChatGPT from a text prompt. The data center processor market has seen two major tectonic shifts in the last decade. It used to be that all data center compute was x86, and well more than 90% of that was Intel. GPUs first appeared in the data center in 2016 (Pascal GPU). Now, the majority of computation is done on GPUs. AMD is looking to pass Intel in x86 share, and... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


GlobalFoundries plans to acquire MIPS, adding RISC-V processor IP and PPA optimization software capabilities to its foundry offerings. MIPS will continue to operate as a standalone business within GF. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025. The EU rolled out new general-purpose AI rules this week to limit copyright infringement, protect public safety, and require transparency... » read more

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