Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Could power beams be the key to smart city infrastructure and 5G/6G connectivity? A new report says both lasers and microwaves offer possible paths forward in this area, though both technologies come with benefits and drawbacks. Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are desi... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Infineon opened a new factory in Cegléd, Hungary, for assembly and test of high-power semiconductor modules for EVs. “The new manufacturing capacities will help Infineon accommodate the growing demand for electromobility applications,” said Infineon’s COO Rutger Wijburg in a press release. Production ramp-up started in February 2022. Infineon also announced it will ... » read more

EVs Raise Energy, Power, And Thermal IC Design Challenges


The transition to electric vehicles is putting pressure on power grids to produce more energy and on vehicles to use that energy much more efficiently, creating a gargantuan set of challenges that will affect every segment of the automotive world, the infrastructure that supports it, and the chips that are required to make all of this work. From a semiconductor standpoint, improvements in th... » read more

Testing Chips For Security


Supply chains and manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly diverse, making it much harder to validate the security in complex chips. To make matters worse, it can be challenging to justify the time and expense to do so, and there’s little agreement on the ideal metrics and processes involved. Still, this is particularly important as chip architectures evolve from a single chip dev... » read more

Auto Safety Tech Adds New IC Design Challenges


The role of AI/ML in automobiles is widening as chipmakers incorporate more intelligence into chips used in vehicles, setting the stage for much safer vehicles, fewer accidents, but much more complex electronic systems. While full autonomy is still on the distant horizon, the short-term focus involves making sure drivers are aware of what's going on around them — pedestrians, objects, or o... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 5


Arm's Andrew Pickard chats with Georgia Tech's Azad Naeemi and Da Eun Shim about an effort to evaluate the benefit of new interconnect materials and wire geometry and determine their impacts at the microprocessor level. Synopsys' Shekhar Kapoor shares highlights from a recent panel exploring the promises, challenges, and realities of 3D IC technology, including the potential of 3D nanosystem... » read more

First Line of Defense: Developer Security Tools In The IDE


We all want to produce better and more secure software, and we want to do it faster than ever before. For developers, this means taking on more responsibility for security without sacrificing velocity, as well as learning new tools and processes that may have been prescribed by teams that are disconnected from the development process. By bringing security detection and remediation into the i... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Golden Signoff ECO For Last-Mile Electronic Design Closure


Electronic design developers really hate iterative, resource-intensive tasks that occur late in the project schedule. Most engineers are under tremendous time to market (TTM) pressure due to competition while being told that they must minimize the cost of both the project and the end chip. In addition, they are struggling to meet power, performance, and area (PPA) requirements far more aggressi... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Highlights from ITC The hot topic at this week’s International Test Conference (ITC) was tackling silent data corruption, with panel discussions, papers, and Google’s Parthasarathy Ranganathan’s keynote address all emphasizing the urgency of the issue. In the past two years Meta, Google, and Microsoft have reported on silent errors, errors not detected at test, which are adversely impact... » read more

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