The Uncertain Future Of In-Memory Compute


Experts at the Table — Part 2: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about AI and the latest issues in SRAM with Tony Chan Carusone, chief technology officer at Alphawave Semi; Steve Roddy, chief marketing officer at Quadric; and Jongsin Yun, memory technologist at Siemens EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. Part one of this conversation can be found here and part 3 is h... » read more

Security Becoming Core Part Of Chip Design — Finally


Security is shifting both left and right in the design flow as chipmakers wrestle with how to build devices that are both secure by design and resilient enough to remain secure throughout their lifetimes. As increasingly complex devices are connected to the internet and to each other, IP vendors, chipmakers, and systems companies are racing to address existing and potential threats across a ... » read more

AI Races To The Edge


AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated and pervasive at the edge, pushing into new application areas and even taking on some of the algorithm training that has been done almost exclusively in large data centers using massive sets of data. There are several key changes behind this shift. The first involves new chip architectures that are focused on processing, moving, and storing data more... » read more

Advanced DFT And Silicon Bring-Up For AI Chips


The AI market is growing quickly, spurring an insatiable demand for powerful AI accelerators. AI chip makers are pressed with aggressive time-to-market goals and need the tools to help them get their chips into the hands of customers as quickly as possible. IC test and silicon bring-up are tasks that can affect both the quality and the time-to-market of AI chips. Different companies are usin... » read more

Use Advanced DFT And Silicon Bring Up To Accelerate AI Chip Design


The market for AI chips is growing quickly, with the 2022 revenue of $20B expected to grow to over $300B by 2030. To keep up with the demand and stay competitive, AI chip designers set aggressive time-to-market goals. Design teams looking for ways to shave significant time off chip development time can look to advanced DFT and silicon bring up techniques described in this paper, including hiera... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 6


Cadence's Vinod Khera checks out potential implications of generative AI for EDA, including how it could increase the learning rate of students and reduce the rising verification cost. Synopsys' Kiran Vittal considers the driving factors behind RISC-V's growth and why it is becoming increasingly important for applications ranging from automotive to 5G mobile, AI, and data centers. Siemens... » read more

AI Accelerator Architectures Poised For Big Changes


AI is driving a frenzy of activity in the chip world as companies across the semiconductor ecosystem race to include AI in their product lineup. The challenge now is how to make AI run faster, use less energy, and to be able to leverage it from the edge to the data center — particularly with the rollout of large language models. On the hardware side, there are two main approaches for accel... » read more

System State Challenges Widen


Knowing the state of a system is essential for many analysis and debug tasks, but it's becoming more difficult in heterogeneous systems that are crammed with an increasing array of features. There is a limit as to how many things engineers can keep track of, and the complexity of today's systems extends far beyond that. Hierarchy and abstraction are used to help focus on the important aspect... » read more

EDA Pushes Deeper Into AI


EDA vendors are ramping up the use of AI/ML in their tools to help chipmakers and systems companies differentiate their products. In some cases, that means using AI to design AI chips, where the number and breadth of features and potential problems is exploding. What remains to be seen is how well these AI-designed chips behave over time, and where exactly AI benefits design teams. And all o... » read more

3D-ICs May Be The Least-Cost Option


When 2.5D and 3D packaging were first conceived, the general consensus was that only the largest semiconductor houses would be able to afford them, but development costs are quickly coming under control. In some cases, these advanced packages actually may turn out to be the lowest-cost options. With stacked die [1], each die is considered to be a complete functional block or sub-system. In t... » read more

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