Growth Spurred By Negatives

By Brian Bailey - 27 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 0

The success and health of the semiconductor industry is driven by the insatiable appetite for increasingly complex devices that impact every aspect of our lives. The number of design starts for the chips used in those devices drives the EDA industry. But at no point in history have there been as many market segments driving innovation as there are today. Moreover, there is no indication this... » read more

Is Programmable Overhead Worth The Cost?

By Brian Bailey - 13 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 0

Programmability has fueled the growth of most semiconductor products, but how much does it actually cost? And is that cost worth it? The answer is more complicated than a simple efficiency formula. It can vary by application, by maturity of technology in a particular market, and in the context of much larger systems. What's considered important for one design may be very different for anothe... » read more

The High But Often Unnecessary Cost Of Coherence

By Brian Bailey - 22 Dec, 2021 - Comments: 3

Cache coherency, a common technique for improving performance in chips, is becoming less useful as general-purpose processors are supplemented with, and sometimes supplanted by, highly specialized accelerators and other processing elements. While cache coherency won't disappear anytime soon, it is increasingly being viewed as a luxury necessary to preserve a long-standing programming paradig... » read more

The Return Of DAC In-Person

By Brian Bailey - 15 Dec, 2021 - Comments: 0

Apart from masked faces everywhere, you could be excused for not knowing that there was a pandemic going on. Sure, the numbers were down, the show floor was smaller, and most of the parties didn't happen, but everyone was so happy to be able to bump elbows with their colleagues. Buttons were available for attendees to show the level of comfort they had with various types of greetings, from "... » read more

Amdahl Limits On AI

By Brian Bailey - 09 Dec, 2021 - Comments: 0

Software and hardware both place limits on how fast an application can run, but finding and eliminating the limitations is becoming more important in this age of multicore heterogeneous processing. The problem is certainly not new. Gene Amdahl (1922-2015) recognized the issue and published a paper about it in 1967. It provided the theoretical speedup for a defined task that could be expected... » read more

Gaps In The AI Debug Process

By Brian Bailey - 23 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

When an AI algorithm is deployed in the field and gives an unexpected result, it's often not clear whether that result is correct. So what happened? Was it wrong? And if so, what caused the error? These are often not simple questions to answer. Moreover, as with all verification problems, the only way to get to the root cause is to break the problem down into manageable pieces. The semico... » read more

AI/ML Workloads Need Extra Security

By Bryon Moyer - 15 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

The need for security is pervading all electronic systems. But given the growth in data-center machine-learning computing, which deals with extremely valuable data, some companies are paying particular attention to handling that data securely. All of the usual data-center security solutions must be brought to bear, but extra effort is needed to ensure that models and data sets are protected ... » read more

HBM2E Raises The Bar For Memory Bandwidth

By Rambus - 10 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

AI/ML training capabilities are growing at a rate of 10X per year driving rapid improvements in every aspect of computing hardware and software. HBM2E memory is the ideal solution for the high bandwidth requirements of AI/ML training, but entails additional design considerations given its 2.5D architecture. Designers can realize the full benefits of HBM2E memory with the silicon-proven memory s... » read more

Bandwidth Utilization Side-Channel On ML Inference Accelerators

By Arm - 10 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

Abstract—Accelerators used for machine learning (ML) inference provide great performance benefits over CPUs. Securing confidential model in inference against off-chip side-channel attacks is critical in harnessing the performance advantage in practice. Data and memory address encryption has been recently proposed to defend against off-chip attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate that bandwidth... » read more

Solving Real World AI Productization Challenges With Adaptive Computing

By Nick Ni - 08 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) moves swiftly, with the pace of innovation only accelerating. While the software industry has been successful in deploying AI in production, the hardware industry – including automotive, industrial, and smart retail – is still in its infancy in terms of AI productization. Major gaps still exist that hinder AI algorithm proof-of-concepts (PoC) from b... » 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

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

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?

by Brian Bailey

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

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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