The potential for AI in cars, whether for driver assistance or full autonomy, has been trumpeted everywhere and continues to grow. Within the car we have vision, radar and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles in front, behind and to the side of the car. Outside the car, V2x promises to share real-time information between vehicles… Read More





Reliability Challenges in Advanced Packages and Boards
Today’s Market Requirements
Complex electronic devices and (sub)systems work for us in important applications, such as aircrafts, trains, trucks, passenger vehicles as well as building infrastructure, manufacturing equipment, medical systems and more. Very high reliability (the ability of a product to meet all requirements… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES Sets a New Bar for Advanced Non-Volatile Memory Technology
Whether it’s the solid-state disk in your laptop, IoT/automotive hardware or edge-based AI, embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) is a critical building block for these and many other applications. The workhorse technology for this capability has typically been NOR flash (eFlash), but a problem looms as eFlash presents challenges… Read More
Coronavirus Chops SPIE Litho EUV Conference
Corona Curtails already quiet SPIE Litho conference
Our best guess is that attendance was off by 30% from last years SPIE conference due to a lack of travelers from many Asian areas obviously out of Corona fear. Even Intel, which is a few miles away was a virtual no-show with a mass cancellation.
More importantly, virtually all after… Read More
Talking Sense With Moortec – The Future Of Embedded Monitoring Part 2
The rate of product development is facing very real challenges as the pace of silicon technology evolution begins to slow. Today, we are squeezing the most out of transistor physics, which is essentially derived from 60-year-old CMOS technology. To maintain the pace of Moore’s law, it is predicted that in 2030 we will need transistors… Read More
An Important Step in Tackling the Debug Monster
If you’ve spent any time at all in the semiconductor industry, you’ve heard the statement that verification consumes two-thirds or more of the total resources on a chip project. The estimates range up to 80%, in which case verification is taking four times the effort of the design process. The exact ratio is subject to debate, but… Read More
Navigating Memory Choices for Your Next Low-Power Design
Choosing a memory architecture can be a daunting task. There are many options to choose from, each with their own power, performance, area and cost profile. The right choice can make a new design competitive and popular in the market. The wrong choice can doom the whole project to failure.
Vadhiraj Sankaranarayanan, senior technical… Read More
Mentor Helps Mythic Implement Analog Approach to AI
The entire field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has resulted from what is called “first principles thinking”, where problems are re-examined using a complete reassessment of the underlying issues and potential solutions. It is a testament to how effective this can be that AI is being used for a rapidly expanding number of applications… Read More
Thermal Issues and Solutions for 3D ICs: Latest Updates and Future Prospect
At DesignCon 2020, ANSYS held a series of sponsored presentations. I was able to attend a couple of them. These were excellent events with the material delivered by talented and high-energy speakers. The DesignCon technical program has many dimensions beyond the conference tracks. One of the presentations dealt with 3D ICs.… Read More
Hybrid Verification for Deep Sequential Convergence
I’m always curious to learn what might be new in clock domain crossing (CDC) verification, having dabbled in this area in my past. It’s an arcane but important field, the sort of thing that if missed can put you out of business, but otherwise only a limited number of people want to think about it to any depth.
The core issue is something… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?