Overview Of Medical Chip Challenges


Medical devices are adopting, and increasingly adapting, a variety of semiconductor technologies to provide new functions and capabilities in smaller form factors. In doing so, they are leveraging increasing processing capabilities, lower power, and new types of sensors to propel health care forward. Many different chip types have been used in medical devices for years, many of them develope... » read more

EDA Vendors Widen Use Of AI


EDA vendors are widening the use of AI and machine learning to incorporate multiple tools, providing continuity and access to consistent data at multiple points in the semiconductor design flow. While gaps remain, early results from a number of EDA tools providers point to significant improvements in performance, power, and time to market. AI/ML has been deployed for some time in EDA. Still,... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


U.S. government officials met with semiconductor industry companies and automakers to request supply chain information it hopes could address the current semiconductor shortage, Reuters reports. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo hopes the information will enable them and industry to "get more granular into the bottlenecks and then ultimately predict challenges before they happen," but also wa... » read more

Optimization Driving Changes In Microarchitectures


The semiconductor ecosystem is at a turning point for how to best architect the CPU based on the explosion of data, the increased usage of AI, and the need for differentiation and customization in leading-edge applications. In the past, much of this would have been accomplished by moving to the next process node. But with the benefits from scaling diminishing at each new node, the focus is s... » read more

Data Tsunami Pushes Boundaries Of IC Interconnects


Rapid increases in machine-generated data are fueling demand for higher-performance multi-core computing, forcing design teams to rethink the movement of data on-chip, off-chip, and between chips in a package. In the past, this was largely handled by the on-chip interconnects, which often were a secondary consideration in the design. But with the rising volumes of data in markets ranging fro... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Packaging and test Advantest and PDF Solutions have launched their first jointly developed offering since forming a partnership in 2020. The new product is called the Advantest Cloud Solutions Dynamic Parametric Test (ACS DPT) solution. It integrates PDF Solutions’ Exensio portfolio of data analytics with Advantest’s V93000 Parametric Test System. The ACS DPT solution is designed to op... » read more

Tradeoffs Between Edge Vs. Cloud


Increasing amounts of processing are being done on the edge, but how the balance will change between what's computed in the cloud versus the edge remains unclear. The answer may depend as much on the value of data and other commercial reasons as on technical limitations. The pendulum has been swinging between doing all processing in the cloud to doing increasing amounts of processing at the ... » read more

On the Road To Higher Memory Bandwidth


In the decade since HBM was first announced, we’ve seen two-and-a-half generations of the standard come to market. HBM’s “wide and slow” architecture debuted first at a data rate of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) running over a 1024-bit wide interface. The product of that data rate and that interface width provided a bandwidth of 128 gigabytes per second (GB/s). In 2016, HBM2 doubled the s... » read more

Will Monolithic 3D DRAM Happen?


As DRAM scaling slows, the industry will need to look for other ways to keep pushing for more and cheaper bits of memory. The most common way of escaping the limits of planar scaling is to add the third dimension to the architecture. There are two ways to accomplish that. One is in a package, which is already happening. The second is to sale the die into the Z axis, which which has been a to... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synaptics will acquire DSP Group, a provider of voice and wireless chipset solutions for converged communications, at $22.00 per share in an all-cash transaction. The deal is worth $538 million. "We continue to invest in technologies that tilt our product mix toward IoT applications," said Michael Hurlston, President and CEO of Synaptics. "DSP Group's expertise in SmartVoice and ULE wireless so... » read more

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