Often, AI inference brings to mind more complex applications hungry for more processing power. At the other end of the spectrum, applications like home appliances and doorbell cameras can offer limited AI-enabled features but must be narrowly scoped to keep costs to a minimum. New area-optimized AI inference technology from… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
PCIe 6.0: Challenges of Achieving 64GT/s with PAM4 in Lossy, HVM Channels
As the premier high-speed communications and system design conference, DesignCon 2023 offered deep insights from various experts on a number of technical topics. In the area of high-speed communications, PCIe has a played a crucial role over the years in supporting increasingly higher communications speed with every new revision.… Read More
Optimization Tradeoffs in Power and Latency for PCIe/CXL in Datacenters
PCI Express Power Bottleneck
Madhumita Sanyal, Sr. Technical Product Manager, and Gary Ruggles, Sr. Product Manager, discussed the tradeoffs between power and latency in PCIe/CXL data centers during a live SemiWiki webinar on January 26, 2023. The demands on PCIe continue to grow with the integration of multiple components… Read More
Alphawave Semi at the Chiplet Summit
The first annual Chiplet Summit was held last week in San Jose and I must say it exceeded my expectations, but I have some advice for the participating speakers and sponsoring companies. A good portion of the content was on WHY chiplets and not HOW. I think we have progressed passed this point and if we keep dwelling on it we will delay… Read More
Weebit ReRAM: NVM that’s better for the planet
Together with our R&D partner CEA-Leti, we recently completed an environmental initiative in which we analyzed the environmental impact of Weebit’s Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM / RRAM) technology compared to Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) – another emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technology.… Read More
Model-Based Design Courses for Students
Amid the tumult of SoC design advances and accompanying verification and implementation demands, it can be easy to forget that all this activity is preceded by architecture design. At the architecture stage the usual SoC verification infrastructure is far too cumbersome for quick turnaround modeling. Such platforms also tend… Read More
Counter-Measures for Voltage Side-Channel Attacks
Nearly every week I read in the popular press another story of a major company being hacked: Twitter, Slack, LastPass, GitHub, Uber, Medibank, Microsoft, American Airlines. What is less reported, yet still important are hardware-oriented hacking attempts at the board-level to target a specific chip, using voltage Side-Channel… Read More
Taming Physical Closure Below 16nm
Atiq Raza, well known in the semiconductor industry, has observed that “there will be no simple chips below 16nm”. By which he meant that only complex and therefore high value SoCs justify the costs of deep submicron design. Getting to closure on PPA goals is getting harder for such designs, especially now at 7nm and 5nm. Place and… Read More
All-In-One Edge Surveillance Gains Traction
Like it or not, the surveillance market is growing, at a CAGR approaching 10%. Big brother concerns sometimes cloud the picture but overlook the much larger practical yet less hype-worthy applications for surveillance. Home and industrial security, enhanced traffic flow management, monitoring for fire and other fast-growing… Read More
CEO Interview: Stephen Fairbanks of Certus Semiconductor
Trained as a semiconductor Analog and RF Circuit Designer, Stephen Fairbanks has been designing and developing process-specific I/O and ESD libraries for 24 years. His foundational training began while attending Brigham Young University designing highspeed 32 GSPS data acquisition systems and RF interfaces for a time-of-flight… Read More
Securing Memory Interfaces