Chip Industry Week In Review

By The SE Staff - 13 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Geopolitics U.S. lawmakers are urging tighter export controls on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to China, warning existing loopholes threaten national security. "China is working to build domestic SME by exploiting access to U.S. and allied subcomponents required to produce tools," states the letter, which also says better coordination with allies is essential. The U.S.... » read more

Chiplets And 3D-ICs Add New Electrical And Mechanical Challenges

By Ann Mutschler - 12 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 1

Key Takeaways • Chiplets and 3D-IC architectures add new thermal-mechanical stresses that can affect the reliability of entire systems. • As chiplets are assembled into packages, defectivity targets become more stringent for each component in a system. • Traditional silos are breaking down, forcing design teams to address issues such as materials choices that previously were handled by... » read more

UCIe’s Major Technical Components Are Now In Place

By Bryon Moyer - 12 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways UCIe 3.0 doubles bandwidth and enhances manageability, addressing new use cases and following an annual update cycle since 2023. The growing demand for chiplet-based architectures in AI data centers is driven by the limitations of monolithic chips, making inter-chiplet communication and connectivity crucial. While UCIe was initially seen as feature-heavy, many of its ma... » read more

Power Leadership At 2nm: Foundation IP Optimized For Next-Gen Hyperscale SoCs

By Andrew Appleby - 12 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

By Andrew Appleby and Daryl Seitzer As demand for data center compute accelerates, power efficiency has become the defining metric for modern CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. Every watt saved directly impacts the massive operating costs of gigawatt-scale AI data centers, where power and cooling account for 40–60% of operational expenditures. To reduce energy consumption and strengthen t... » read more

Minimum Energy Per Query

By Brian Bailey - 12 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 1

Key Takeaways Extracting heat from a chip faster is a short-term fix to a bigger problem. The longer-term challenge is how to reduce the amount of energy used per query. Data movement, guardbanding, and software inefficiency are key targets for the future. Heat is a serious problem within AI chips, and it is limiting how much processing can be done. The solution is either to... » read more

Simulate Faster with SimAI Software for High Returns at a Low Cost of Ownership

By Synopsys - 11 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

While the value of engineering simulation has been proven for decades, only a small percentage of engineers report using artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify their simulation results at scale. However, AI has the potential to make large-scale simulations even faster, more precise, and more cost-effective. AI-enabled simulation not only amplifies the performance and returns of simulatio... » read more

Resistance In Advanced Packages Is Now A System-Level Problem

By Gregory Haley - 10 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways Kelvin measurement, which has been in use for decades, is no longer sufficient for addressing resistance in complex chips. The problem is that resistance is no longer concentrated in transistors, and where it does show up isn't always consistent or obvious. Traditional pass/fail approaches need to be replaced by more granular and flexible analytics and methodologies. ... » read more

Silicon Photonics In The Data Center: What A CMOS Exec Needs To Know

By Geoff Tate - 09 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Silicon Photonics is changing the data center, with the biggest changes still ahead. Figure 1: Google Jupiter Network for multi-thousand Ironwood TPU clusters. Source: Google Refresher for new readers: Data centers contain hundreds or thousands of racks. For example, the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 AI compute/switch rack is about 24 inches wide, about 88 inches high and 42 inches deep. I... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 06 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 1

Intel hired ex-Qualcomm GPU guru Eric Demers for the company's high-performance GPU push, setting the stage for a three-way battle with Nvidia and AMD. The key targets for Intel and AMD will be better power efficiency and a programming model that rivals CUDA, but don't expect Nvidia to stand still. Acquisitions Texas Instruments plans to acquire Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B cash to enhance i... » read more

Securing Hardware For The Quantum Era

By Ann Mutschler - 05 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways: Quantum threats to security are already real. Adversaries are already harvesting data that will be decrypted later by quantum computers. Quantum computers capable of breaking RSA and ECC may arrive as early as next year. Asymmetric encryption algorithms like RSA and ECC will become inadequate against quantum threats, while symmetric encryption (such as AES) is less vul... » read more

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