Designing Low Energy Chips And Systems


Energy optimization is beginning to shift left as design teams begin examining new ways to boost the performance of devices without impacting battery life or ratcheting up electricity costs. Unlike power optimization, where a skilled engineering team may reduce power by 1% to 5%, energy efficiency may be able to cut effective power in half. But those gains require a significant rethinking of... » read more

Top Tech Videos Of 2020


2020 shaped up to be a year of major upheaval, emerging markets and even increased demand in certain sectors. So it's not surprising that videos focusing on AI, balancing power and performance, designing and manufacturing at advanced nodes, advanced packaging, and automotive-related subjects were the most popular. Of the 68 videos published this year, the following were the most viewed in ea... » read more

Silo Busting In The Design Flow


An increasing number of dependencies in system design are forcing companies, people, tools, and flows to become more collaborative. Design and EDA companies must adapt to this new reality because it has become impossible for anyone to do it all by themselves. Moreover, what happens in manufacturing and packaging needs to be considered up front, and what gets designed in the design phase may ... » read more

The Quest To Make 5G Systems Reliable


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How do we measure the reli... » read more

ESD Requirements Are Changing


Standards for specifying a chip’s ability to withstand electrostatic discharge (ESD) are changing – in some cases, getting tougher, and in others, easing up. ESD protection has been on a path from a one-size-fits-all approach to one where a signal’s usage helps to determine what kind of protection it should get. Protecting chips from ESD damage has been a longstanding part of IC design... » read more

Scaling At The Angstrom Level


It now appears likely that 2nm will happen, and possibly the next node or two beyond that. What isn't clear is what those chips will be used for, by whom, and what they ultimately will look like. The uncertainty isn't about the technical challenges. The semiconductor industry understands the implications of every step of the manufacturing process down to the sub-nanometer level, including ho... » read more

Disaggregation Of The SoC


The rise of edge computing could do to the cloud what the PC did to the minicomputer and the mainframe. In the end, all of those co-existed (despite the fact that the minicomputer morphed into commodity servers from companies like Dell and HP). What's different this time around is that the computing done inside of those boxes is moving. It is being distributed in ways never considered feasi... » read more

Why EV Battery Design Is So Difficult


Automotive batteries always have been treated as plug-and-play parts of a vehicle, but that approach no longer works in electric vehicles. In fact, the battery is now a differentiating factor, and it is the heaviest and most expensive component. What used to be a relatively simple component has been replaced by a variety of sensors to measure complex static thermal and aging effects, as well... » read more

Determining Where Power Analysis Matters Most


How much accuracy is required in every stage of power analysis is becoming a subject of debate, as engineering teams wrestle with a mix of new architectures, different use cases and increasing pressure to get designs out on time. The question isn't whether power is a critical factor in designs anymore. That is a given. It is now about the most efficient way to tackle those issues, as well as... » read more

Are Digital Twins Something For EDA To Pursue?


‘Digital Twins’ are one of the new, fashionable key concepts for system developers, but do they fit with EDA? How many different types of engines do these twins run on – abstract simulation, signal-based RTL simulation, emulation, prototyping, actual silicon? What should the use models be called for digital twinning – like reproduction of bugs from silicon in emulation? Or optimizing th... » read more

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