Engineering Within Constraints


One of the themes of DAC this year was the next phase of machine learning. It is as if CNNs and RNNs officially have migrated from the research community and all that is left now is optimization. The academics need something new. Quite correctly, they have identified power as the biggest problem associated with learning and inferencing today, and a large part of that problem is associated with ... » read more

Spiking Neural Networks Place Data In Time


Artificial neural networks have found a variety of commercial applications, from facial recognition to recommendation engines. Compute-in-memory accelerators seek to improve the computational efficiency of these networks by helping to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck. But the success of artificial neural networks also highlights their inadequacies. They replicate only a small subset of th... » read more

Going On the Edge


Emmanuel Sabonnadière, chief executive of Leti, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about artificial intelligence (AI), edge computing and chip technologies. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where is AI going in the future? Sabonnadière: I am a strong believer that edge AI will change our lives. Today’s microelectronics are organized with 80% of things i... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 29


Brain-inspired computing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. It will consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer. ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 20


Brain chips Pennsylvania State University has developed a technology that could enable futuristic biochips, namely those that mimic the human brain. In the lab, Penn State combined a thin film of vanadium dioxide (VO2) on a titanium dioxide substrate to create an oscillating switch. VO2 is an exotic material that exhibits semiconductor-to-metal transitions at 68 °C. In the R&D stage fo... » read more

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