Balancing Programmability And Performance In Cars


The rate of change in the automotive industry is accelerating with the shift toward software-defined vehicles and ongoing advancements in algorithms and chip architectures. The challenge now is to figure out the best way to prevent rapid obsolescence, improve safety, and keep the cost of these changes to a minimum. Today, updatable automotive hardware is typically achieved through FPGAs, but... » read more

Photonics Could Reduce The Cost Of Lidar


Using light to move data over shorter distances is becoming more common, both because there is much more data to move around and because photons are faster and cooler than electrons. Using optical fiber for mission-critical communication is already well established. It has been the preferred PHY for long-haul communications for decades because it doesn’t suffer from the attenuation losses ... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 4


Synopsys' Jyotika Athavale and Randy Fish sit down with Google's Rama Govindaraju and Microsoft's Robert S. Chappell to discuss silent data corruption and why a solution will require chip designers and manufacturers, software and hardware engineers, vendors, and anyone involved in computer data to collaborate and take the issue seriously. Siemens' Karen Chow and Joel Mercier explain the rela... » read more

Design Optimal ESD Protection With Context-Aware SPICE Simulation


Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is a major reliability concern for modern ICs. Ensuring the robustness of ICs in an ESD event by providing adequate ESD protection is proving to be a major challenge for IC designers due to factors such as shrinking of the design features, reduction in gate oxide thickness, increase in the contact and interconnect resistance and an increase in the overall design co... » read more

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups


Using AI in EDA is reinvigorating the whole tools industry, prompting established players to upgrade their tool offerings with AI/ML features, while drawing in startups trying to carve out differentiated approaches to fill unaddressed gaps with new tools and methodologies. Today’s new generation of entrepreneurs is comprised of both young post-grads with innovative ideas and industry veter... » read more

Edge Devices Require New Security Approaches


The diversity of connected devices and chips at the edge — the vaguely defined middle ground between the end point and the cloud — is significantly widening the potential attack surface and creating more opportunities for cyberattacks. The edge build-out has been underway for at least the past half-decade, largely driven by an explosion in data and increasing demands to process that data... » read more

Ready For Curvilinear: New Innovations For Resistance Extraction


The rapid evolution of semiconductor industry, fueled by the propagation of IOT applications, image sensors, photonics and MEMS applications and other emerging technologies dramatically increased the complexity of IC design. Designers often use unconventional structures to achieve the desired functionality and optimal performance. For example, image sensors use wide polygons in the layout and a... » read more

Developing Workflows To Streamline System-Level Design


Experts At The Table: One of the big challenges facing EDA companies is explaining to customers what's possible, how to streamline their designs, and what can be accomplished at what level of risk. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about how relationships are fundamentally changing between EDA companies and their customers Michal Siwinski, chief marketing officer at Arteris; Chris Muet... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 28


Synopsys' Jon Ames checks out how the Ultra Ethernet Consortium aims to revolutionize networking by optimizing Ethernet for the rapidly evolving AI and HPC workloads by addressing critical issues like tail latency that are encountered by machine learning algorithms in large compute clusters. Cadence's Kos Gitchev introduces the DDR5 Multiplexed Rank DIMM (MRDIMM), a memory module technology ... » read more

Hardware Security Set To Grow Quickly


Experts At The Table: The hardware security ecosystem is young and relatively small but could see a major boom in the coming years. As companies begin to acknowledge how vulnerable their hardware is, industry standards are being set, but must leave room for engineers to experiment. As part of an effort to determine the best way forward, Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts... » read more

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