Chip Industry Week in Review


Retaliations and countermoves leading up to planned trade talks between the U.S. and China led experts to wonder, 'Who's winning?' New activity on this front: China issued questionnaires to some U.S. semiconductor firms as part of an anti-dumping probe, demanding detailed data on sales, profit margins, logistics costs and Chinese customer names for analog chips. The probe appears aimed at ... » read more

Circuit Layout-Level Hardware Trojan Detection


A new technical paper titled "A Needle in the Haystack: Inspecting Circuit Layout to Identify Hardware Trojans" was published by researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas and Qualcomm. Abstract "Distributed integrated circuit (IC) supply chain has resulted in a myriad of security vulnerabilities including that of hardware Trojan (HT). An HT can perform malicious modifications on an I... » read more

Transition-Metal Nitride Halide Dielectrics for Transition-Metal Dichalcogenide Transistors


Abstract "Using first-principles calculations, we investigate six transition-metal nitride halides (TMNHs): HfNBr, HfNCl, TiNBr, TiNCl, ZrNBr, and ZrNCl as potential van der Waals (vdW) dielectrics for transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) channel transistors. We calculate the exfoliation energies and bulk phonon energies and find that the six TMNHs are exfoliable and thermodynamically stabl... » read more