Dealing With Security Holes In Chips


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

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A AMD will acquire Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock deal. "Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our data center business and enable us to pursue a broader customer base across more markets,” said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2021. The acquisition of the programmable logic giant will leave only a few purepla... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Synopsys added support for Infineon's automotive AI chip, the AURIX TC4xx 32-bit microcontroller with parallel processing unit. Dialog Semiconductor announced automotive qualification for its DA7280 high-definition haptic driver. The company Alps Alpine is using the DA7280 in Alps Alpine Heavy, the latest version of its HAPTIC Reactor Linear Resonant Actuators (LRAs). Bosch, M... » read more

Performance and Power Tradeoffs At 7/5nm


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power optimization with Oliver King, CTO at Moortec; João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys; Dino Toffolon, senior vice president of engineering at Synopsys; Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Kiran Burli, senior director of marketing for Arm's Physical Design Group; Kam Kittrell, senior product management group d... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 21


Rambus' Frank Ferro and IDC's Shane Rau compare the evolution of HBM and GDDR6, as well as the design tradeoffs and challenges of the two memory types. Mentor's Neil Johnson compares unit testing and formal property checking as first steps for verifying low-level RTL functionality. Synopsys' Patrick Carey considers the competing demands of delivering a product as soon as possible and maki... » read more

GDDR6 Memory For Life On The Edge


With the torrid growth in data traffic, it is unsurprising that the number of hyperscale data centers has grown apace. According to analysts at the Synergy Research Group, in July of this year there were 541 hyperscale data centers worldwide. That represents a doubling in the number since 2015. Even more striking, there are an additional 176 in the pipeline, so the breakneck growth in hyperscal... » read more

Slower Metal Bogs Down SoC Performance


Metal interconnect delays are rising, offsetting some of the gains from faster transistors at each successive process node. Older architectures were born in a time when compute time was the limiter. But with interconnects increasingly viewed as the limiter on advanced nodes, there’s an opportunity to rethink how we build systems-on-chips (SoCs). ”Interconnect delay is a fundamental tr... » read more

Security Verification of Rambus’ CryptoManager Root of Trust by Tortuga Logic


The confidentiality and integrity of cryptographic key material is critical to maintaining system security. A hardware root of trust, such as the Rambus CryptoManager Root of Trust, is designed to securely generate, store, and employ cryptographic keys. Tortuga Logic has independently verified the policies surrounding access to keys stored within registers in the CryptoManager Root of Trust usi... » read more

Scramble For The White Space


Chipmakers are pushing to utilize more of the unused portion of a design for different functions, reducing margin in the rest of the chip to more clearly define that white space. White space typically is used to relieve back-end routing congestion before all of the silicon area is used up. But a significant amount of space still remain unused. That provides an opportunity for inserting monit... » read more

Protecting Chiplet Architectures With Hardware Security


Chiplets are gaining significant traction as they provide compelling benefits for advancing semiconductor performance, costs, and time to market. With Moore’s Law slowing, building more powerful chips translates into building bigger chips. But with chip dimensions pushing up against reticle limits, growing the size of chips is increasingly impractical. Chiplets offer a new path forward by dis... » read more

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