Data Center Evolution: From Pluggable To Co-Packaged Optics


A torrent of data traffic is growing at an exponential rate driven by applications including 5G, AI/ML, video streaming, online gaming, ADAS and more. Handling this data traffic are hyperscale data centers that have grown to over 500 in number worldwide with a third as many in the pipeline. To scale computing resources to the growing data demands, hyperscale data centers deploy fiber optics thr... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — data center, edge, IoT, 5G Qualcomm settled its 5G licensing disagreement with Huawei, which will pay $1.8 billion in back royalties and will pay for licensing going forward. Huawei is also now the world’s largest supplier of smartphones, surpassing Samsung Electronics Co. Qualcomm also announced a super-fast charging platform this week for Android devices that is sup... » read more

RISC-V Gaining Traction


Part 1: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss where and why RISC-V is doing well, with Zdenek Prikryl, CTO of Codasip; Helena Handschuh, a Rambus Security Technologies fellow; Louie De Luna, director of marketing at Aldec; Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, CEO of Valtrix Systems; and Bipul Talukdar, North America director of applications engineering at SmartDV. What follows are excerpt of that ... » read more

Blog Review: July 29


Rambus' Scott Best digs into low-cost attacks against security chips that are often used to gauge how resistant and well-designed they are and defensive countermeasures that can be taken. Mentor's Colin Walls urges embedded developers to put a priority on writing clear, maintainable code and considers when using a higher level language like C++ may be helpful. Synopsys' Scott Knowlton fin... » read more

What’s After 5G


This year’s IEEE Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (VLSI 2020) included a presentation by NTT Docomo that looked far into the future of cellular communications, setting the stage for a broad industry shift in communication. This is far from trivial. 5G only just recently entered the commercial world, and — especially with the higher millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies — it has ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Arm's parent company, Japanese tech conglomerate Softbank, reportedly is considering a sale or IPO of its Arm subsidiary, which it purchased in 2016 for $32 billion in cash. Considering that Arm chips are in most smart phones, as well as an increasing number of computers and IoT and edge devices, this development is being closely followed by most of the tech world. Last week, Softbank directed ... » read more

An Expanding Application Space For GDDR6 Memory


The origins of graphics double data rate (GDDR) memory can be traced to the rise of 3D gaming on PCs and consoles. The first GPUs used single data rate (SDR) and double data rate (DDR) DRAM, the same memory used for CPU main memory. The quest for higher frame rates at higher resolutions drove the need for a graphics-workload specific memory solution. The commercial success of gaming PCs and con... » read more

Moving Data And Computing Closer Together


The speed of processors has increased to the point where they often are no longer the performance bottleneck for many systems. It's now about data access. Moving data around costs both time and power, and developers are looking for ways to reduce the distances that data has to move. That means bringing data and memory nearer to each other. “Hard drives didn't have enough data flow to cr... » read more

Power Impact At The Physical Layer Causes Downstream Effects


Data movement is rapidly emerging as one of the top design challenges, and it is being complicated by new chip architectures and physical effects caused by increasing density at advanced nodes and in multi-chip systems. Until the introduction of the latest revs of high-bandwidth memory, as well as GDDR6, memory was considered the next big bottleneck. But other compute bottlenecks have been e... » read more

The Evolution Of Ethernet To 800G And MACsec Encryption


Ethernet is a frame-based data communication technology that employs variable-sized frames to carry a data payload. This contrasts with long-haul Optical Transport Networks (OTN) that use fixed-sized frames. The size of Ethernet frames ranges from a minimum of 60 bytes up to 1500 bytes, and in case of jumbo frames, up to 9K bytes. A frame is a Layer 2 data container with the physical addresses ... » read more

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