AI’s Impact On Power And Performance


AI/ML is creeping into everything these days. There are AI chips, and there are chips that include elements of AI, particularly for inferencing. The big question is how well they will affect performance and power, and the answer isn't obvious. There are two main phases of AI, the training and the inferencing. Almost all training is done in the cloud using extremely large data sets. In fact, ... » read more

AI’s Blind Spots


The rush to utilize AI/ML in nearly everything and everywhere raises some serious questions about how all of this technology will evolve, age and perform over time. AI is very useful at doing certain tasks, notably finding patterns and relationships in broad data sets that are well beyond the capabilities of the human mind. This is very valuable for adding efficiency into processes of all so... » read more

Different Ways To Improve Chip Reliability


A push toward greater reliability in safety- and mission-critical applications is prompting some innovative approaches in semiconductor design, manufacturing, and post-production analysis of chip behavior. While quality over time has come under intensive scrutiny in automotive, where German carmakers require chips to last 18 years with zero defects, it isn't the only market demanding extende... » read more

Planning For Failures In Automotive


The automotive industry is undergoing some fundamental shifts as it backs away from the traditional siloed approach to one of graceful failure, slowing the evolution to fully autonomy and rethinking how to achieve its goals for a reasonable cost. For traditional automakers, this means borrowing some proven strategies from the electronics world rather than trying to evolve traditional automot... » read more

Emulation Fills The Pre-Silicon Verification Gap For Autonomous Vehicles


Veloce emulators provide the scale and performance to ensure that automotive applications run smoothly, safely, and securely. This paper describes how emulation is used to run realistic driver scenarios, investigate vehicle dynamics, and analyze power and communications metrics — all in a platform that virtualizes the design and allows both hardware and software to be tested together or separ... » read more

Monitoring Heat On AI Chips


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, talks about monitoring temperature differences on-chip in AI chips and how to make the most of the power that can be delivered to a device and why accuracy is so critical. » read more

The Growing Impact Of Portable Stimulus


It has been a year since Accellera's Portable Test and Stimulus Specification became a standard. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact it has had, and the future direction of it, with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Tom Fitzpatrick, strategic verification architect for Mentor, a Siemen... » read more

The Critical But Less Obvious Risks In AI


AI has been the subject of intense debate since it was first introduced back in the mid-1950s, but the real threat is a lot more mundane and potentially even more serious than the fear-inducing picture painted by its critics. Replacing jobs with technology has been a controversial subject for more than a century. AI is a relative newcomer in that debate. While the term "artificial intelligen... » read more

How Hardware Can Bias AI Data


Clean data is essential to good results in AI and machine learning, but data can become biased and less accurate at multiple stages in its lifetime—from moment it is generated all the way through to when it is processed—and it can happen in ways that are not always obvious and often difficult to discern. Blatant data corruption produces erroneous results that are relatively easy to ident... » read more

IP’s Growing Impact On Yield And Reliability


Chipmakers are finding it increasingly difficult to achieve first-pass silicon with design IP sourced internally and from different IP providers, and especially with configurable IP. Utilizing poorly qualified IP and waiting for issues to appear during the design-to-verification phase just before tape-out can pose high risks for design houses and foundries alike in terms of cost and time to... » read more

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