Auto Chip Aging Accelerates In Hot Climates


Automotive chips are aging significantly faster than expected in hot climates with sustained high temperatures, raising concerns about the reliability of electrified vehicles over time and whether advanced-node chips are the right choice for safety-critical applications. Many of the most advanced electronics used in vehicles today are ASIL D-compliant, expected to function up to 125° C. But... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global chips sales hit a record $56.9 billion in October, a 22% increase versus October 2023, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Also, global semiconductor equipment billings reached $30.38 billion in Q3 2024, a 19% YoY increase and 13% growth QoQ, SEMI reported. TSMC commenced equipment installation for its 2nm fab in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, six months ahead of schedule. The 2n... » read more

Tools Needed To Track, Catalog Hardware Vulnerabilities


Monitoring for cyberattacks is a key component of hardware-based security, but what happens afterward is equally important. Logging and cataloging identified hardware vulnerabilities to ensure they are not repeated is essential for security. In fact, thousands of weak points have been identified as part of the chip design process, and even posted publicly online. Nevertheless, many companies... » read more

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Safeguarding The Future Of Digital Security


As technological advancements surge forward, the specter of quantum computing looms ever larger. While the promise of quantum computers holds the potential to revolutionize fields like weather forecasting, drug discovery, and fundamental physics, it also harbors a significant threat to our current cryptographic systems. The risk is not just a future concern; any sensitive data intercepted today... » read more

Radar, AI, And Increasing Autonomy Are Redefining Auto IC Designs


Increasing levels of autonomy in vehicles are fundamentally changing which technologies are chosen, how they are used and interact with each other, and how they will evolve throughout a vehicle's lifetime. Entire vehicle architectures are being reshaped continuously to enable the application of AI across a broad swath of functions, prompting increasing investment into technologies that were ... » read more

Where Cryptography Is Headed


Reports began surfacing in October that Chinese researchers used a quantum computer to crack military-grade AES 256-bit encryption. Those reports turned out to be wrong, but that did little to dampen concerns about what would happen if it was true. The looming threat of quantum computers breaking today's encryption, and the stockpiling of encrypted data in preparation for a time when it can ... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 4


Siemens' Reetika explains how creating and verifying a complete reset tree structure allows designers to trace the flow of reset signals across the design and ensure that every sequential element is tagged correctly within its respective reset domain. Cadence's Durlov Khan suggests DDR5 DIMM Memory Models and Discrete Component Models as part of a flexible approach to validating specific com... » read more

SRAM PUF – The Secure Silicon Fingerprint


For many years, silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been seen as a promising and innovative security technology making steady progress. Today, Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM)-based PUFs have been deployed in hundreds of millions of devices and offer a mature and viable security component that is achieving widespread adoption in commercial products. They are found in devices ran... » read more

Aging, Complexity, And AI In Analog Design


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss abstraction in analog vs. digital, how analog circuits age, the growing role of AI, and why there is so much margin in analog designs, with Mo Faisal, president and CEO of Movellus; Hany Elhak, executive director of product management at Synopsys; Cedric Pujol, product manager at Keysight; and Pradeep Thiagarajan, principal pro... » read more

Successful Design Of Power Management Chips


With an industry as large as semiconductors, there are often surprises lurking in some of the more specialized product categories. Everyone knows that huge chips such as CPUs and GPUs command high prices and that memory chips are ubiquitous. However, the domain of power management integrated circuits (PMICs) is less well known to many observers. PMICs are impressive in terms of their technol... » read more

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