Surprises At Hot Chips 2016

By Ed Sperling - 25 Aug, 2016 - Comments: 0

Who would have thought an Intel architect would be on stage talking about cutting pennies out of MCU prices? Or that Nvidia would be trumpeting an automotive SoC whose chief performance advantages come from the integration of ARM CPUs that can support up to eight virtual machines? Or that Samsung would be developing a quad-core mobile processor from scratch based on its own unique architecture?... » read more

It’s Time To Get Your University In Sync With Zynq

By Aldec - 25 Aug, 2016 - Comments: 0

By Zach Nelson It’s time for universities to say goodbye to their outdated FPGA boards and introduce the Xilinx Zynq chip. The chip is a device which combines an FPGA fabric with a processing unit. The chip is very similar to other FPGA devices, but it does have a few key advantages and features that can enhance your designs and increase its capabilities. What can Zynq do? The Zynq ... » read more

To Emulate Or Prototype?

By Krzysztof Szczur - 28 Jul, 2016 - Comments: 0

FPGA Prototyping is more challenging than emulation. Yet for the time invested in prototype setup, developers are rewarded with a validation platform that is capable of running orders of magnitude faster than emulation. Emulation also has benefits that appeal especially to design verification engineers. Aside from the completely automated compilation and setup flow, it offers robust debugg... » read more

Stacked Die Changes

By Ed Sperling - 27 Jul, 2016 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with David Pan, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas; Max Min, senior technical manager at Samsung; John Hunt, senior director of engineering at ASE; and Sitaram Arkalgud, vice president of 3D portfolio and technologies at Invensas. What follows are excerpts of tha... » read more

The Road To 5nm

By Ed Sperling - 23 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 1

There is strong likelihood that enough companies will move to 7nm to warrant the investment. How many will move forward to 5nm is far less certain. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is big-company consolidation. There are simply fewer customers left who can afford to build chips at the most advanced nodes. Intel bought Altera. Avago bought Broadcom. NXP bought Freescale. GlobalFoundrie... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT

By Jeff Dorsch - 17 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

M&A Samsung Electronics will buy Joyent, a provider of public and private cloud services. The Korean company said the purchase will give Samsung a cloud platform for the Internet of Things, mobile devices, and cloud-based software and services. “Samsung brings us the scale we need to grow our cloud and software business, an anchor tenant for our industry leading Triton container-as-a-ser... » read more

The Week In Review: Design

By Jesse Allen - 17 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

Tools Synopsys uncorked the latest version of its software for the design of optical communication systems and photonic integrated circuits at the signal propagation level, adding a new interface and expanding the software's application design libraries. Mentor Graphics said it would provide a variety of tools to support the new Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices from Xilinx, dual-core field-... » read more

Unexpected Security Holes

By Ed Sperling - 13 Apr, 2016 - Comments: 0

Security is emerging as one of the top challenges in semiconductor design across a variety of markets, with the number of security holes growing by orders of magnitude in sectors that have never dealt with these kinds of design constraints before. While security has been a topic of conversation for years in mobile phones and data centers, commercial and industrial equipment is being connecte... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 2)

By Ed Sperling - 21 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 1

New chip architectures and new packaging options—including fan-outs and 2.5D—are changing basic design considerations for how many cores are needed, what they are used for, and how to solve some increasingly troublesome bottlenecks. As reported in part one, just adding more cores doesn't necessarily improve performance, and adding the wrong size or kinds of cores wastes power. That has s... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing

By Mark LaPedus - 11 Mar, 2016 - Comments: 0

In a surprising move, Intel is quietly in the process of acquiring IMS Nanofabrication, a developer of multi-beam e-beam tools for mask writing applications, Semiconductor Engineering has learned. With the deal, Intel is moving into uncharted territory by buying a semiconductor equipment company. In the past, though, the chip giant has invested in equipment vendors, such as ASML, Nikon and... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
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