Blog Review: Aug. 23


Siemens' Stephen Chavez discusses best practices when it comes to thermal analysis for PCB design, including component placement and close collaboration between mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines. Synopsys' Gary Ruggles, Richard Solomon, and Varun Agrawal introduce the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification and how it could help improve latency through computational offloadi... » read more

Power Semis Usher In The Silicon Carbide Era


Silicon carbide production is ramping quickly, driven by end market demand in automotive and price parity with silicon. Many thousands of power semiconductor modules already are in use in electric vehicles for on-board charging, traction inversion, and DC-to-DC conversion. Today, most of those are fabricated using silicon-based IGBTs. A shift to silicon carbide-based MOSFETs doubles the powe... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 16


Synopsys' Johannes Stahl and Tim Kogel suggest that multi-die systems require a new approach at the architecture planning phase and why chip designers can’t ignore physical effects such as layout, power, temperature, or IR-drop. Siemens' Rich Edelman argues for using the waveform window in a GUI rather than $display when debugging UVM. Cadence's Paul Scannell stresses the need for diver... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Intel issued an advisory of a potential security vulnerability in some of its processors. The company recommends updating to the latest firmware version. NVIDIA unveiled its GH200 Grace Hopper platform, based on 144 Arm Neoverse cores and 282GB of HBM3e memory. Meanwhile, Chinese internet companies including Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba ordered about $5 billion worth of A800 proces... » read more

Specialization Vs. Generalization In Processors


Academia has been looking at specialization for many years, but solutions were rejected because general-purpose solutions were advancing fast enough to keep up with most application requirements. That is no longer the case. The introduction and support of the RISC-V processor architecture has attracted a lot of attention, but whether that is the right direction for the majority of modern comput... » read more

MRAM Getting More Attention At Smallest Nodes


Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) appears to be gaining traction at the most advanced nodes, in part because of recent improvements in the memory itself and in part because new markets require solutions for which MRAM may be uniquely qualified. There are still plenty of skeptics when it comes to MRAM, and lots of potential competitors. That has limited MRAM to a niche role over the past couple de... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Hyundai, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and others invested a combined $100 million in Canada-based Tenstorrent to accelerate the design and development of AI chiplets and machine-learning software and allow the integration of AI into future Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles, plus other future mobilities such as robotics and advanced air mobility (AAM). The National Highway Traffic Safety Administr... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, Nordic, and Bosch are jointly investing in a new RISC-V company, to be formed in Germany, that will speed up RISC-V’s adoption in commercial products. The company will be “a single source to enable compatible RISC-V based products, provide reference architectures, and help establish solutions widely used in the industry,” according to a press release. The co... » read more

AI Transformer Models Enable Machine Vision Object Detection


The object detection required for machine vision applications such as autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, and surveillance applications depends on AI modeling. The goal now is to improve the models and simplify their development. Over the years, many AI models have been introduced, including YOLO, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, RetinaNet, and others, to detect images or video signals, interp... » read more

Semiconductor Industry Is Pulling AI Across A Diversity Of End Uses And Applications


Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of joining a group of industry peers during SEMICON West and the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco for an enlightening panel discussion that we organized titled, “How AI Is Reinventing the Semiconductor Industry Inside and Out.” Moderated by Gartner, I was joined on the panel by senior executives from Advantest, Synopsys and the TinyML Foun... » read more

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