IC Stresses Affect Reliability At Advanced Nodes


Thermal-induced stress is now one of the leading causes of transistor failures, and it is becoming a top focus for chipmakers as more and different kinds of chips and materials are packaged together for safety- and mission-critical applications. The causes of stress are numerous. In heterogeneous packages, it can stem from multiple components composed of different materials. “These materia... » read more

Don’t Let Your ML Accelerator Vendor Tell You The ‘F-Word’


Machine learning (ML) inference in devices is all the rage. Nearly every new system on chip (SoC) design start for mobile phones, tablets, smart security cameras, automotive applications, wireless systems, and more has a requirement for a hefty amount of ML capability on-chip. That has silicon design teams scrambling to find ML processing power to add to the existing menu of processing engines ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Chip design Fraunhofer IIS/EAS implemented the Bunch of Wires (BoW) standard-based interface IP from the Open Compute Project (OCP) on Samsung's 5nm technology. The effort is intended to make chiplets more feasible for products with small and medium-sized production runs and determine the need for additional uniform standards in the future, such as for die-to-die bonding. “As part of t... » read more

Using AI To Speed Up Edge Computing


AI is being designed into a growing number of chips and systems at the edge, where it is being used to speed up the processing of massive amounts of data, and to reduce power by partitioning and prioritization. That, in turn, allows systems to act upon that data more rapidly. Processing data at the edge rather than in the cloud provides a number of well-documented benefits. Because the physi... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2022


Semiconductor manufacturing, test, and inspection equipment startups did well in March. Investors funded a wide variety of equipment companies, including test equipment, materials handling, and those that make parts and components. In the manufacturing space, several companies developing manufacturing execution systems received funding, as well as a startup trying to prevent counterfeit parts f... » read more

ML Focus Shifting Toward Software


New machine-learning (ML) architectures continue to garner a huge amount of attention as the race continues to provide the most effective acceleration architectures for the cloud and the edge, but attention is starting to shift from the hardware to the software tools. The big question now is whether a software abstraction eventually will win out over hardware details in determining who the f... » read more

Microelectronics And The AI Revolution


It is no secret that artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are critical drivers for growth in electronics, and particularly, for semiconductors. The recent AI Hardware Summit showcased trends in AI/ML, both in enabling and using it in various application domains, including EDA. As part of the summit, Imec had organized a panel on “Advanced Microelectronics Technologies Driving ... » read more

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