Blog Review: Jan. 3


Ansys' Steve Pytel argues that increased signaling speeds and frequencies have led to signal integrity issues that circuit simulation alone cannot handle. Cadence's Paul McLellan dives into the details of Intel's 10nm process, including three layers of self-aligned quadruple patterning, contact-over-active-gate, and cobalt for contact fill. Mentor's Ron Press and Vidya Neerkundar argue th... » read more

System Bits: Dec. 5


[caption id="attachment_429586" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Vivienne Sze, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Source: MIT[/caption] Building deep learning hardware A new course at MIT is bringing together both electrical engineering and computer science to educate student in the highly sought after field of deep learning. Vivienne Sze, an assoc... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 14


Tracking cyber attacks According to Georgia Tech, assessing the extent and impact of network or computer system attacks has been largely a time-consuming manual process, until now since a new software system being developed by cybersecurity researchers here will largely automate that process, allowing investigators to quickly and accurately pinpoint how intruders entered the network, what data... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys will acquire Black Duck Software, a provider of software for securing and managing open source software. Synopsys already has a stake in this area from its Coverity acquisition in 2014, which it has been using to analyze security practices in open source software. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Black Duck's products automate the process of identifying and ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 24


Redefining unit measurements At a recent meeting, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) took the next step towards the expected redefinition of four base units within the International System of Units (SI). The SI base units include the following metrics or constants--meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and the candela. Here’s the fundamental constant... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 24


Optical communication on silicon chips With the huge increase in computing performance in recent decades achieved by squeezing ever more transistors into a tighter space on microchips, at the same time this downsizing has also meant packing the wiring within microprocessors ever more tightly together. This has led to effects such as signal leakage between components, which can slow down commun... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 3


Making buckypaper The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology has developed a process that will transform carbon nanotube powder into so-called buckypaper. Buckypaper is a thin sheet made from carbon nanotubes. They are sometimes known as multi-walled carbon nanotube sheets. Meanwhile, carbon nanotubes are tube-shaped materials, which are 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of human ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Sept. 19


Ion implant lithography At a recent conference, the University of California at Berkeley presented more details about its efforts to develop a multiple patterning method using tilted ion implantation (TII) technology. TII is somewhat similar today’s self-aligned double patterning (SADP) processes in logic and memory. SADP and the follow-on technology, self-aligned quadruple (SAQP), enable... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 25


Metrology for the intelligence community The semiconductor industry continues to move full speed ahead with traditional chip scaling. There are several challenges in the arena. One of the big but lessor known challenges is metrology. Metrology, the science of characterizing and measuring films and structures, is becoming more complex, challenging and expensive at each node. Looking to solv... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 18


Brain microscopes Rice University is developing a tiny and flat microscope for a special application--it will be able to decode and trigger neurons on the surface of the brain. The microscope technology, dubbed FlatScope, is part of a $65 million program announced by the U.S.-based Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The DARPA project, dubbed Neural Engineering System Design ... » read more

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