Avoiding Down Times: Monitoring, Diagnostics And Troubleshooting Of Industrial Wireless Systems


The ever-growing proliferation of wireless devices and technologies used for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as patient monitoring, military surveillance, and industrial automation and control, has created an increasing need for methods and tools for connectivity prediction, information flow monitoring, and failure analysis to increase the dependability of the wireless network. Inde... » read more

Auto Chip Test Issues Grow


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling Semiconductor suppliers are flocking to the automotive chip market to gain share in fitting out the connected car and the autonomous vehicle. But before those chips are sold to automotive manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers, they must be tested and certified to meet stringent industry standards. This is no ordinary testing, though. Assisted and autonomous v... » read more

How Good Is 95% Accuracy?


Conventional, deterministic computers don’t make mistakes. They execute a predictable series of computations in response to any given input. The input might be mistaken. The logic behind the operations that are performed might be flawed. But the computer will always do exactly what it has been told to do. When unexpected results occur, they can be attributed to the programmer, the system manu... » read more

The Trouble With Models


Models are becoming more difficult to develop, integrate and utilize effectively at 10/7nm and beyond as design complexity, process variation and physical effects add to the number of variables that need to be taken into account. Modeling is a way of abstracting the complexity in various parts of the semiconductor design, and there can be dozens of models required for complex SoCs. Some are ... » read more

Tech Talk: Substrate Noise Coupling


Roland Jancke, head of the department for design methodology for the Fraunhofer's Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the impact of substrate noise coupling on reliability of chips and how to deal with this issue. https://youtu.be/7E2rCwYr6-o » read more

Advanced Packaging Is Suddenly Very Cool


The hottest chip markets today—automotive AI for autonomous and heavily assisted driving, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality—all are beginning to look at advanced packaging as the best path forward for improving performance and reducing power. Over the past four years, which is when 2.5D and fan-out wafer-level packaging first really began garnering interest, these and othe... » read more

Automotive Foundries


The race to win a piece of the automotive electronics business has now reached the foundry level, and right now it's not clear exactly how this is going to work. This is uncharted territory for everyone. The build-out of electronics for assisted and autonomous driving is brand new. For existing cars, most of the chips being used are off-the-shelf microcontrollers, commodity MEMS sensors, and... » read more

Tech Talk: Embedded Flash For Cars


Wei Cong, director of product engineering at Kilopass, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about one-time programmable embedded memory in automotive applications and why it is becoming essential for driver-assisted and autonomous vehicles. https://youtu.be/R_3DHWpxiKc » read more

Addressing Thermal Reliability In Next-Gen FinFET Designs


The next generation of chips on the 10/7nm finFET processes will be able to cram more devices into same area while also boosting performance, but there's a price to pay for that. The 3D fin structures trap heat, so the the temperature rises on the device and there is no way to dissipate that heat. This combination of higher current density, higher performance and higher temperature has a det... » read more

How To Make Autonomous Vehicles Reliable


The number of unknowns in automotive chips, subsystems and entire vehicles is growing as higher levels of driver assistance are deployed, sparking new concerns and approaches about how to improve reliability of these systems. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) will need to detect objects, animals and people, and they will be used for parking assistance, night vision and collision avoi... » read more

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