Blog Review: Aug. 11


Arm's Rahul Mathur finds that traditional interconnects have become a bottleneck for improving IC performance and suggests buried interconnects as a way to lower signal routing delay. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out forksheet FETs, a new transistor type that could allow scaling past 3nm, and the interconnect advances that will need to accompany it. A Synopsys writer explains the new LP... » read more

Designing Chips For Test Data


Collecting data to determine the health of a chip throughout its lifecycle is becoming necessary as chips are used in more critical applications, but being able to access that data isn't always so simple. It requires moving signals through a complex, sometimes unpredictable, and often hostile environment, which is a daunting challenge under the best of conditions. There is a growing sense of... » read more

Power-Aware Test: Addressing Power Challenges In DFT And Test


Integrated circuit (IC) sizes continue to grow as they meet the compute requirements of cutting-edge applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, and data centers. As design sizes increase, the total power consumption of the chip also increases. While process node scaling reduces a transistor’s size and its operating-voltage, power scaling has not kept up with the si... » read more

Who Owns In-Chip Monitoring Data?


In-chip monitors provide unprecedented visibility into the inner workings of complex integrated circuits for everything from process control to fine binning, preventive system maintenance, and failure analysis. But there may be many consumers of different slices of the data at very different phases of the chip lifecycle, raising questions about who controls and owns all of that data. The ans... » read more

Automotive Lidar Technologies Battle It Out


Lidar is likely to be added to the list of sensors that future cars will use to help with navigation and safety, but most likely it won't be the large rotating mirror assembly on the top of vehicles. Newer solid-state radar technologies are being researched and developed, although it’s not yet clear which of these will win. “The benefits of lidar technology are well known dating back to ... » read more

Protecting Automotive SoCs Starts With Secure IP


The automotive industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Cars are becoming more sophisticated and valuable with increased connectivity and capabilities to provide a better user experience. They are also collecting and transmitting more and more sensitive data and thus are becoming very attractive targets for attacks. Cybercrime in the automotive industry is growing rapidly. How bad i... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

Securing 5G And IoT With Fuzzing


5G will revolutionize many industries, with up to 100 times the speed, 100 times the capacity, and one-tenth the latency compared to 4G LTE. But in addition to providing superior performance, 5G expands the attack surface of apps and IoT devices that rely on this next-gen network. In addition to known security exploits, we’re bound to see unknown, novelty attacks. Fuzz testing (or fuzzing)... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 4


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as industry luminaries celebrate 50 years of the microprocessor with a discussion on major challenges to the growth of microprocessors, inflection points over the last 50 years, and predictions for the next 25. Siemens EDA's Vladimir Kirichenko warns that designing electrical and thermal systems separately may lead to various problems such as late design ch... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

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