Week in Review: Design, Low Power


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $35 million for 12 projects involving ultra-efficient power management. Called Arpa-E, the program encouraged participants to use medium-voltage electricity in new ways with real-world applications, such as industry, transportation and the grid. The top two award winners were Eaton Corp. (Arden, NC) for its DC wide-bandgap static circuit breaker, ... » read more

The Race To Multi-Domain SoCs


K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris IP, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the impact of automotive and AI on chip design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What do you see as the biggest changes over the next 12 to 24 months? Janac: There are segments of the semiconductor market that are shrinking, such as DTV and simple IoT. Others are going ... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things A dairy barn without any people working in it. An automated greenhouse for produce. Coming soon, little robots that will weed crop fields and look for diseased plants. This is Rivendale Farms, in the countryside west of Pittsburgh, which is 175 acres serving as a beta site for agricultural Internet of Things technology. The small farm has about 150 Jersey cows, each of which... » read more

Mostly Upbeat Outlook For Chips


2019 has started with cautious optimism for the semiconductor industry, despite dark clouds that dot the horizon. Market segments such as cryptocurrencies and virtual reality are not living up to expectations, the market for smart phones appears to be saturated, and DRAM prices are dropping, leading to cut-backs in capital expenditures. EDA companies are talking about sales to China being pu... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 16


Mentor's Harry Foster takes a look at how quickly FPGAs are adopting recent verification techniques, with formal gaining at a rapid pace. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the details of two new RISC-V based cores: Western Digital's open source SweRV and Esperanto's Maxion. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding digs into a recent cybersecurity report from the U.S. government and finds a troubling n... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Automotive, health care, manufacturing, and the public sector could be transformed this year by Internet of Things technology, Bob Violino writes. Taqee Khaled, director of strategy at Nerdery, a digital business consultancy, predicts 2019 will see rapid evolution in enterprise IoT pilot initiatives and implementations. "This acceleration is due, in part, to advances in manu... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 9


Cadence's Paul McLellan considers the challenges facing copper interconnects as resistance gets harder to deal with and the pros and cons of potential replacement materials. Mentor's Harry Foster digs into how FPGA design and verification engineers spend their time, and why the time designers spend designing has increased. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding contends that the way we use passwords ... » read more

Chip Industry In Rapid Transition


Wally Rhines, CEO Emeritus at Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about global economics, AI, the growing emphasis on customization, and the impact of security and higher abstraction levels. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where do you see the biggest changes happening across the chip industry? Rhines: 2018 was a hot year for fab... » read more

Lies, Damn Lies, And TOPS/Watt


There are almost a dozen vendors promoting inferencing IP, but none of them gives even a ResNet-50 benchmark. The only information they state typically is TOPS (Tera-Operations/Second) and TOPS/Watt. These two indicators of performance and power efficiency are almost useless by themselves. So what, exactly, does X TOPS really tell you about performance for your application? When a vendor ... » read more

What’s the Right Path For Scaling?


The growing challenges of traditional chip scaling at advanced nodes are prompting the industry to take a harder look at different options for future devices. Scaling is still on the list, with the industry laying plans for 5nm and beyond. But less conventional approaches are becoming more viable and gaining traction, as well, including advanced packaging and in-memory computing. Some option... » read more

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