Less Moore Means More Intelligence


It would seem as if the entire industry is flooding the forums with articles about [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], as it reaches its 50th birthday (April 19th) and that this represents the longest and most important exponential in the history of man. The numbers and that impact are everywhere and I do not intend to repeat them. There are lots of articles talking about when Moore’s law ... » read more

Blog Review: April 22


DARPA thinks machine-brain interfaces are poised to become an industry-changing technology. Rambus' David G. Stork brings us emerging developments in the field from the Neural Engineering Boot Camp. If you live in an area that doesn't get quite enough sun for solar panels, how about a smart window that harvests energy from wind and rain? In this week's top five picks, Ansys' Justin Nescott a... » read more

New Patterning Paradigm?


Chip scaling is becoming more difficult at each process node, but the industry continues to find new and innovative ways to solve the problems at every turn. And so chipmakers continue to march down the various process nodes. But the question is for how much longer? In fact, at 16nm/14nm and beyond, chipmakers are finding new and different challenges, which, in turn, could slow IC scaling or br... » read more

50 Years Of Moore’s Law


The Industry at 50 This month marks the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, an amazing milestone for the semiconductor industry. Looking back through our industry’s history, we must marvel at the speed, growth, technical sophistication and transformative changes computer chips have made over the past few decades. None of this would have been possible without semiconductor equipment and materi... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Intel is quietly delaying its process ramp at the 10nm node, according to multiple sources. In an e-mail, a spokesman for Intel said: “We have not disclosed a schedule for our 10nm process and we won't engage in speculation about it.” In March, though, Intel was supposed to make fab tool buys for high-volume manufacturing at 10nm, sources said. But now, those purchases won’t happen... » read more

Stacked Die, Phase Two


The initial hype phase of [getkc id="82" kc_name="2.5D"] appears to be over. There are multiple offerings in development or on the market already from Xilinx, Altera, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, AMD, all focused on better throughput over shorter distances with better yield and lower power. Even Intel has jumped on the bandwagon, saying that 2.5D will be essential for extending [getkc id="74" comment="M... » read more

One-On-One: Dark Silicon


Professor Michael Taylor’s research group at UC San Diego is studying ways to exploit dark silicon to optimize circuit designs for energy efficiency. He spoke with Semiconductor Engineering about the post-Dennard scaling regime, energy efficiency from integrated circuits all the way up to data centers, and how the manufacturing side can help. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (F... » read more

How We’ll Get There from Here


The electronics industry is like a battleship with remarkable handling properties. I thought about it this week sitting at an industry event a day after stumbling across Neptune—the technology project, not the god. Those two experiences forced me to rethink some fundamental assumptions about system design and how the ecosystem responds to change. If you’ve not heard of Neptune, it�... » read more

Blog Review: April 8


No other human endeavor has seen such sustained exponential growth. But it's the end of an era for Moore's Law, says Cadence's Axel Scherer—and only the beginning of one for Moore's Law 2.0. Synopsys' Amit Sharma tackles the cache coherency extensions of the ARM Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) and points out that the infrastructure required for their verification needs to scale up in s... » read more

Ecosystem Changes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in the semiconductor ecosystem with Kelvin Low, senior director of foundry marketing at [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung Semiconductor"]; John Costello, vice president of product planning at [getentity id="22849" e_name="Altera"]; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"], and Michiel Ligthart, p... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →