The Process Design Kit: Protecting Design Know-How


Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each company. In these days, when designs contained hundreds of transistors, companies modeled each feature in an IC at a first principles level, meaning each transistor or fundamental device was analyzed an... » read more

The Next Materials Race


Trade wars are costly on many fronts, and a trade war between the United States and China is bound to cause a variety of problems that no one anticipated. But in some areas, there may be a silver lining. And where there is no silver lining available, other materials may suffice. For decades, big chipmakers have been squeezing the entire semiconductor supply chain in a race to double the num... » read more

AI Begins To Reshape Chip Design


Artificial intelligence is beginning to impact semiconductor design as architects begin leveraging its capabilities to improve performance and reduce power, setting the stage for a number of foundational shifts in how chips are developed, manufactured and updated in the future. AI—and machine learning and deep learning subsets—can be used to greatly improve the functional control and pow... » read more

The Impact of Moore’s Law Ending


Over the past couple of process nodes the chip industry has come to grips with the fact that Moore's Law is slowing down or ending for many market segments. What isn't clear is what comes next, because even if chipmakers stay at older nodes they will face a series of new challenges that will drive up costs and increase design complexity. Chip design has faced a number of hurdles just to get ... » read more

The Race To Design Larger Systems


For more than a decade, tools vendors and design houses have been talking about leveraging their tools and expertise to help design systems of systems. They're finally getting their chance. The basic idea behind this strategy has always been that issues inside any electronic system—performance, power, signal integrity, area—have all been dealt all the way down to the sub-atomic level in ... » read more

From Physics To Applications


Jack Harding, president and CEO of eSilicon, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the shift toward AI and advanced packaging, and the growing opportunities at 7nm at a time when Moore's Law has begun slowing down. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Over the past year, the industry has changed its focus from shrinking features and consolidation to all sorts o... » read more

RISC-V: More Than a Core


The open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is attracting a lot of attention across the semiconductor industry, but its long-term success will depend on levels of cooperation never seen before in the semiconductor industry. The big question now is how committed the industry is to RISC-V's success. The real value that RISC-V brings is the promise of an ecosystem and the opportun... » read more

Reliability, Machine Learning And Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss reliability, resilience, machine learning and advanced packaging with Rahul Goyal, vice president in the technology and manufacturing group at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor business unit at ANSYS; and Lluis Paris, director of IP portfolio marketing at TSMC. What follows ar... » read more

Kandou’s Glasswing IP


Introduction The growing digitalization of our society has made our lives connected and, in many aspects, easier. But the digital revolution also implies that the total amount of data processed in the world is doubling every two years or so. Electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops, satellites, servers or self-driving vehicles must cope with twice as much data, at higher speeds. Tradi... » read more

The Next Big Chip Companies


Rambus’ Mike Noonen looks at why putting everything on a single die no longer works, what comes after Moore’s Law, and what the new business model looks like for chipmakers. https://youtu.be/X6Kca8Vm-wA » read more

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