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

Electronic Design For Reliable Autonomous Driving


In the area of advanced driver assistance systems, most car makers and their suppliers have laid out exciting road maps all the way to highly automated and fully automated driving in 5 to 10 years. But are the electronics keeping up with these ambitious plans? At least for the automotive industry as a mass market, the current design processes for microchips and systems are not yet ready. An ... » 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

Measuring ISO 26262 Metrics Of Analog Circuitry In ICs


The goals for automotive electronics are zero defective parts per million (0 DPPM), and safe operation during the expected lifetime of the vehicle. The ISO 26262 standard provides procedures and metrics required before delivery to ensure systems can be expected to operate without unreasonable risk. ISO 26262 specifies circuit metrics and minimum values that are design requirements. Since the... » 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

Challenges And Improvement Of Reliability In Advanced Wafer Level Packaging Technology


The number of WLCSP (wafer-level packages) used in semiconductor packaging has experienced significant growth since its introduction in 1998. The growth has been driven primarily by mobile consumer products because of the small form factor and high performance enabled in the package design. And it is also attractive to wearable electronics and IoT products. Although WLCSSP is now a widely ac... » read more

New Power Concerns At 10/7nm


As chip sizes and complexity continues to grow exponentially at 7nm and below, managing power is becoming much more difficult. There are a number of factors that come into play at advanced nodes, including more and different types of processors, more chip-package decisions, and more susceptibility to noise of all sorts due to thinner insulation layers and wires. The result is that engineers ... » read more

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