Five DAC Keynotes


The ending of Moore's Law may be about to create a new golden age for design, especially one fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning. But design will become task-, application- and domain-specific, and will require that we think about the lifecycle of the products in a different way. In the future, we also will have to design for augmentation of experience, not just automation... » read more

Tech Talk: Data-Driven Design


Steven Woo, distinguished inventor at Rambus, talks about memory hierarchies and how they are changing as the amount of data continues to grow. https://youtu.be/4FwZ1YeQa18 » read more

What’s Next In Neuromorphic Computing


To integrate devices into functioning systems, it's necessary to consider what those systems are actually supposed to do. Regardless of the application, [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"] tasks involve a training phase and an inference phase. In the training phase, the system is presented with a large dataset and learns how to "correctly" analyze it. In supervised learning, the data... » read more

New Nodes, Materials, Memories


Ellie Yieh, vice president and general manager of Advanced Product Technology Development at [getentity id="22817" e_name="Applied Materials"], and head of the company's Maydan Technology Center, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about challenges, changes and solutions at advanced nodes and with new applications. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How far can w... » read more

The Next 5 Years Of Chip Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of scaling, the impact of variation, and the introduction of new materials and technologies, with Rick Gottscho, CTO of [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"]; Mark Dougherty, vice president of advanced module engineering at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; David Shortt, technical fellow at [getentity id="22876" co... » read more

Pushing DRAM’s Limits


If humans ever do create a genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence, it may well exhibit the frustration of waiting for data arrive. The access bandwidth of DRAM-based computer memory has improved by a factor of 20x over the past two decades. Capacity increased 128x during the same period. But latency improved only 1.3x, according to Kevin Chang, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon Universit... » read more

Toward Neuromorphic Designs


Part one of this series considered the mechanisms of learning and memory in biological brains. Each neuron has many fibers, which connect to adjacent neurons at synapses. The concentration of ions such as potassium and calcium inside the cell is different from the concentration outside. The cellular membrane thus serves as a capacitor. When a stimulus is received, the neuron releases neur... » read more

What Happened To ReRAM?


Resistive RAM (ReRAM), one of a handful of next-generation memories under development, is finally gaining traction after years of setbacks. Fujitsu and Panasonic are jointly ramping up a second-generation ReRAM device. In addition, Crossbar is sampling a 40nm ReRAM technology, which is being made on a foundry basis by China’s SMIC. And not to be outdone, TSMC and UMC recently put ReRAM on ... » read more

Four Foundries Back MRAM


Four major foundries plan to offer MRAM as an embedded memory solution by this year or next, setting the stage for what finally could prove to be a game-changer for this next-generation memory technology. GlobalFoundries, Samsung, TSMC and UMC plan to start offering spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive RAM (ST-MRAM or STT-MRAM) as an alternative or a replacement to NOR flash, possibly start... » read more

What Is Spin Torque MRAM?


The memory market is going in several different directions at once. On one front, the traditional memory types, such as DRAM and flash, remain the workhorse technologies. Then, several vendors are readying the next-generation memory types. As part of an ongoing series, Semiconductor Engineering will explore where the new and traditional memory technologies are heading. For this segment, P... » read more

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