Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design


Data centers are undergoing a fundamental change, shifting from standard processing models to more data-centric approaches based upon customized hardware, less movement of data, and more pooling of resources. Driven by a flood of web searches, Bitcoin mining, video streaming, data centers are in a race to provide the most efficient and fastest processing possible. But because there are so ma... » read more

Architectural Considerations For AI


Custom chips, labeled as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), are appearing on a weekly basis, each claiming to be 10X faster than existing devices or consume 1/10 the power. Whether that is enough to dethrone existing architectures, such as GPUs and FPGAs, or whether they will survive alongside those architectures isn't clear yet. The problem, or the opportunity, is that t... » read more

Changes In Sensors And DSPs


Pulin Desai, group director for product marketing, management and business development at Cadence, talks about why processing is moving closer to the end point, how to save energy through reduced area and sensor fusion, and the impact of specialization, 3D capture and always-on circuits. » read more

Thermal Floorplanning For Chips


Heat management is becoming crucial to an increasing number of chips, and it's one of a growing number of interconnected factors that must be considered throughout the entire development flow. At the same time, design requirements are exacerbating thermal problems. Those designs either have to increase margins or become more intelligent about the way heat is generated, distributed, and dissi... » read more

Accelerating AI/ML Inferencing With GDDR6 DRAM


The origins of graphics double data rate (GDDR) memory can be traced to the rise of 3D gaming on PCs and consoles. The first graphics processing units (GPU) packed single data rate (SDR) and double data rate (DDR) DRAM – the same solution used for CPU main memory. As gaming evolved, the demand for higher frame rates at ever higher resolutions drove the need for a graphics-workload specific me... » read more

3 Technologies That Will Challenge Test


As chips are deployed in more complex systems and with new technologies, it's not clear exactly what chipmakers and systems vendors will be testing. The standard tests for voltage, temperature and electrical throughput still will be needed, of course. But that won't be sufficient to ensure that sensor fusion, machine learning, or millimeter wave 5/6G will be functioning properly. Each of tho... » read more

Scaling Simulation


Without functional simulation the semiconductor industry would not be where it is today, but some people in the industry contend it hasn't received the attention and research it deserves, causing a stagnation in performance. Others disagree, noting that design sizes have increased by orders of magnitude while design times have shrunk, pointing to simulation remaining a suitable tool for the job... » read more

Kria K26 SOM: The Ideal Platform For Vision AI At The Edge


With various advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, many high-compute applications are now getting deployed on edge devices. So, there is a need for an efficient hardware that can execute complex algorithms efficiently as well as adapt to rapid enhancements in this technology. Xilinx's Kria K26 SOM is designed to address the requirements of executing ... » read more

Securing AI/ML With A Hardware Root Of Trust


AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) is now pervasive across all industries. It contributes to rationalizing and harnessing the enormous amount of information made available by the current massive wave of digitization. Digitization is transforming how business is run and how value is produced using digital technologies. Data, the raw material of AI/ML and deep learning algorithms, i... » read more

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