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Automotive is setting the goalposts for next generation designs

Automotive is setting the goalposts for next generation designs
by Tom Simon on 07-24-2018 at 12:00 pm

Automotive applications are having a tremendous influence on semiconductor design. This influence is coming from innovations in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, communications, sensors that all serve the requirements of the automotive market. It should come as no surprise that ADAS and autonomous driving are … Read More


Innovation in IoT

Innovation in IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 07-24-2018 at 7:00 am

There is some interesting work reported this month in the Communications of the ACM, on novel sensing, multi-purpose uses for existing sensors and new ideas in agricultural IoT. The article opens on a method called Hitch-hike to use back-scatter methods for communication; I confess this doesn’t interest me so much, so I won’t … Read More


Keeping Pace With 5nm Heartbeat

Keeping Pace With 5nm Heartbeat
by Alex Tan on 07-23-2018 at 12:00 pm

A Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) gives design a heartbeat. Despite its minute footprint, it has many purposes such as being part of the clock generation circuits, on-chip digital temperature sensor, process control monitoring in the scribe-line or as baseline circuitry to facilitate an effective measurement of the design’s power… Read More


FDSOI Status and Roadmap

FDSOI Status and Roadmap
by Scotten Jones on 07-23-2018 at 7:00 am

FDSOI is gaining traction in the market place. At their foundry forum in May, Samsung announced they have 17 FDSOI products in high volume manufacturing (you can read Tom Dilliger’s write up of the Samsung Foundry Forum here). At SEMICON West in July, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) announced FDSOI design wins worth $2 billion dollars in … Read More


SEMICON West – Soitec is becoming a key enabler

SEMICON West – Soitec is becoming a key enabler
by Scotten Jones on 07-22-2018 at 7:00 am

A variety of growing and emerging segments of the semiconductor industry rely on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) wafers. Soitec is the primary source for SOI wafers particularly on 300mm. On Tuesday at SEMICON I got to sit down with Bernard Aspar, Soitec’s Executive Vice President, Communication & Power BU and Christophe… Read More


Maximize Bandwidth in your Massively Parallel AI SoCs?

Maximize Bandwidth in your Massively Parallel AI SoCs?
by Daniel Nenni on 07-20-2018 at 12:00 pm

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most talked about topics on the conference circuit this year and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. AI is also one of the trending topics on SemiWiki with organic search bringing us a wealth of new viewers. You may also have noticed that AI is a hot topic for webinars like the one I am writing… Read More


TI Patent Priorities

TI Patent Priorities
by Daniel Nenni on 07-20-2018 at 7:00 am

This is the seventh in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”

Probably the most innovative person I met at Texas Instruments, other than Jack Kilby, was Ken Bean. Ken had a list of patents that would impress even the most skeptical. He started his career at Eagle Picher and came to TI in the mid 1960s. He was a warm,… Read More


Aprisa and Apogee – The New Avatars

Aprisa and Apogee – The New Avatars
by Alex Tan on 07-19-2018 at 12:00 pm

Earlier physical optimization impacts a design QoR gain and can disclose potential hurdles in dealing with unknown design variants such as new IP inclusion or new process node issues. Along the RTL-to-GDS2 implementation continuum, a left-shift move requires a robust modeling and proper context captures in order to produce… Read More


A Last-Level Cache for SoCs

A Last-Level Cache for SoCs
by Bernard Murphy on 07-19-2018 at 7:00 am

We tend to think of cache primarily as an adjunct to processors to improve performance. Reading and writing main memory (DRAM) is very slow thanks to all the package and board impedance between chips. If you can fetch blocks of contiguous memory from the DRAM to a local on-chip memory, locality of reference in most code ensures much… Read More


Machine Learning and Embedded FPGA IP

Machine Learning and Embedded FPGA IP
by Tom Dillinger on 07-18-2018 at 12:00 pm

Machine learning-based applications have become prevalent across consumer, medical, and automotive markets. Still, the underlying architecture(s) and implementations are evolving rapidly, to best fit the throughput, latency, and power efficiency requirements of an ever increasing application space. Although ML is … Read More