Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan Japan's Rapidus and the University of Tokyo are teaming up with France's Leti to meet its previously announced mass production goal of 2nm chips by 2027, and chips in the 1nm range in the 2030s. Rapidus was formed in 2022 with the support of eight Japanese companies — Sony, Kioxia, Denso, NEC, NTT, SoftBank, Toyota, and Mitsubishi's banking arm, ... » read more

DRAM Choices Are Suddenly Much More Complicated


Chipmakers are beginning to incorporate multiple types and flavors of DRAM in the same advanced package, setting the stage for increasingly distributed memory but significantly more complex designs. Despite years of predictions that DRAM would be replaced by other types of memory, it remains an essential component in nearly all computing. Rather than fading away, its footprint is increasing,... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Gregory Haley, Jesse Allen, and Liz Allan President Biden issued an executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It says entities need to report large-scale computing clusters and the total computing power available, including “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1,026 inte... » read more

CXL: The Future Of Memory Interconnect?


Momentum for sharing memory resources between processor cores is growing inside of data centers, where the explosion in data is driving the need to be able to scale memory up and down in a way that roughly mirrors how processors are used today. A year after the CXL Consortium and JEDEC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to formalize collaboration between the two organizations, suppor... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

ReRAM Seeks To Replace NOR


Resistive RAM is gaining renewed attention as demand for faster and cheaper non-volatile memory alternatives continues to grow, particularly in applications such as automotive. Embedded flash has long left designers wishing for better write speeds and lower energy consumption, but as the leading edge of that technology shrunk to 28nm, another problem arose. Manufacturing flash memory at thos... » read more

Patterns And Issues In AI Chip Design


AI is becoming more than a talking point for chip and system design, taking on increasingly complex tasks that are now competitive requirements in many markets. But the inclusion of AI, along with its machine learning and deep learning subcategories, also has injected widespread confusion and uncertainty into every aspect of electronics. This is partly due to the fact that it touches so many... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans for retooling existing automotive factories for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and supporting local jobs, plus a notice of intent for $3.5 billion in funding to expand domestic manufacturing of batteries for EVs and the nation’s grid, and for battery materials and components that are currently imported... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The AI chip market is booming. Gartner expects revenue for the year will hit $53.4 billion, up 20.9% from 2022. The firm predicts that number will grow to $119 billion by 2027.  In the consumer electronics market, the value of AI-enabled application processors will amount to $1.2 billion in 2023, up from $558 million in 2022. Germany will spend nearly €1 billion (~US$1.7B) over the next t... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Intel issued an advisory of a potential security vulnerability in some of its processors. The company recommends updating to the latest firmware version. NVIDIA unveiled its GH200 Grace Hopper platform, based on 144 Arm Neoverse cores and 282GB of HBM3e memory. Meanwhile, Chinese internet companies including Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba ordered about $5 billion worth of A800 proces... » read more

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