Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 27 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

AI featured big at this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco. Dozens of companies featured AI-related tools (see product section below), as well as significant improvements to existing tools and some entirely new approaches for designing chips. Among the highlights: Siemens unveiled an AI-enhanced toolset for the EDA design flow that enables customers to integrate the... » read more

Distributing Intelligence Inside Multi-Die Assemblies

By Ed Sperling - 26 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The shift from SoCs to multi-die assemblies requires more and smarter controllers to be distributed throughout a package in order to ensure optimal performance, signal integrity, and no downtime. In planar SoCs, many of these kinds of functions are often managed by a single CPU or MCU. But as logic increasingly is decomposed into chiplets, connected to each other and memories by TSVs, hybrid... » read more

Security Vulnerabilities Difficult To Detect In Verification Flow

By Ann Mutschler - 26 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

As designs grow in complexity and size, the landscape for potential hackers to infiltrate a chip at any point in either the design or verification flow increases commensurately. Long considered to be a “safe” aspect of the design process, verification now must be a focus of chip developers from a security perspective. This also means the concept of trust has never been higher, and the tr... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 20 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Texas Instruments will invest more than $60 billion to build and expand seven semiconductor fabs in Texas and Utah, supporting more than 60,000 U.S. jobs. Chinese automakers — including SAIC Motor, Changan, Great Wall Motor, BYD, Li Auto and Geely — are aiming to launch new models with 100% homemade chips, some as early as 2026, reports Nikkei Asia. Marvell introduced 2nm custom SRAM ... » read more

Optimizing Data Movement

By Ann Mutschler - 29 May, 2025 - Comments: 1

Demand for new and better AI models is creating an insatiable demand for more processing power and much better data throughput, but it's also creating a slew of new challenges for which there are not always good solutions. The key here is figuring out where bottlenecks might crop up in complex chips and advanced packages. This involves a clear understanding of how much bandwidth is required ... » read more

CSR Management: Life Beyond Spreadsheets

By Insaf Meliane - 29 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

The ASIC, ASSP, and system-on-chip (SoC) design landscape has undergone significant evolution over the past two decades. For example, while early devices contained only tens of intellectual property (IP) blocks, modern high-end SoCs may integrate up to 1000 IPs, each containing millions of logic gates. Furthermore, unlike their predecessors, today’s SoCs are no longer primarily hardware; i... » read more

Modernizing The Hardware / Software Interface – Life Beyond Spreadsheets

By Arteris - 28 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

The hardware/software interface (HSI) is the core of advanced semiconductor design, allowing seamless interaction between software and components like accelerators and peripherals. It underpins critical functions such as documentation, firmware, and hardware verification. Inefficient or outdated HSI management reduces collaboration, increases design errors, and threatens the performance and qua... » read more

More Data, More Redundant Interconnects

By Ed Sperling - 19 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

The proliferation of AI dramatically increases the amount of data that needs to be processed, stored, and moved, accelerating the aging of signal paths through which that data travels and forcing chipmakers to build more redundancy into the interconnects. In the past, nearly all redundant data paths were contained within a planar chip using a relatively thick silicon substrate. But as chipma... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 16 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. Newly proposed U.S. legislation called the Chip Security Act would use location verification tracking as a tool to help combat chip smuggling. This follows a report by the Economist that showed Taiwan exports of advanced chips to Malaysia in the first quarter has nearly reached 2024 totals, heightening concerns that China... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 02 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis of changes at Intel Foundry. Intel rolled out its updated process technology roadmap this week, along with early process design kit (PDK) for its 14A gate-all-around process technology. That node will utilize high-NA EUV, and include direct contact power delivery, the second generation of its backside power delivery techno... » read more

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