Amdahl Limits On AI


Software and hardware both place limits on how fast an application can run, but finding and eliminating the limitations is becoming more important in this age of multicore heterogeneous processing. The problem is certainly not new. Gene Amdahl (1922-2015) recognized the issue and published a paper about it in 1967. It provided the theoretical speedup for a defined task that could be expected... » read more

HBM3: Big Impact On Chip Design


An insatiable demand for bandwidth in everything from high-performance computing to AI training, gaming, and automotive applications is fueling the development of the next generation of high-bandwidth memory. HBM3 will bring a 2X bump in bandwidth and capacity per stack, as well as some other benefits. What was once considered a "slow and wide" memory technology to reduce signal traffic dela... » read more

Optimizing AI Systems


Inserting AI and machine learning into chips adds a whole new dimension of complexity, and creates a variety of potential problems, including deadlocks, loss of performance, and difficulty in achieving closure on many fronts. Gajinder Panesar, fellow at Siemens EDA, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changed and how to optimize these new devices and systems by monitoring them f... » read more

Wrestling With Analog At 3nm


Analog engineers are facing big challenges at 3nm, forcing them to come up with creative solutions to a widening set of issues at each new process node. Still, these problems must be addressed, because no digital chip will work without at least some analog circuitry. As fabrication technologies shrink, digital logic improves in some combination of power, performance, and area. The process te... » read more

Data Overload In The Data Center


Dealing with increasing volumes of data inside of data centers requires an understanding of architectures, the flow of data between memory and processors, bandwidth, cache coherency and new memory types and interfaces. Gary Ruggles, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, talks about how these systems are being revamped to improve performance and reduce power. » read more

Why It’s So Hard To Stop Cyber Attacks On ICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security risks across multiple market segments with Helena Handschuh, security technologies fellow at Rambus; Mike Borza, principal security technologist for the Solutions Group at Synopsys; Steve Carlson, director of aerospace and defense solutions at Cadence; Alric Althoff, senior hardware security engineer at Tortuga Logic; and Joe Kiniry, princi... » read more

Power Models For Machine Learning


AI and machine learning are being designed into just about everything, but the chip industry lacks sufficient tools to gauge how much power and energy an algorithm is using when it runs on a particular hardware platform. The missing information is a serious limiter for energy-sensitive devices. As the old maxim goes, you can't optimize what you can't measure. Today, the focus is on functiona... » read more

Arm Goes For Performance


At the recent Linley Processor Conference, Arm presented two processors. This was regarded as so confidential that the original pre-conference version of the presentations didn't contain the Arm one, even though that pdf was only put online about an hour before. But most of the outline of what they presented they already talked about in May, a few months ago. I said recently that this seem... » read more

The Benefits Of Using Embedded Sensing Fabrics In AI Devices


AI chips, regardless of the application, are not regular ASICs and tend to be very large, this essentially means that AI chips are reaching the reticle limits in-terms of their size. They are also usually dominated by an array of regular structures and this helps to mitigate yield issues by building in tolerance to defect density due to the sheer number of processor blocks. The reason behind... » read more

Dealing With Two Very Different Sides Of 5G


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one of this discussi... » read more

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