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Intel Rethinks a Common Substrate to Combat Chip Shortage

Intel is getting creative in how it addresses manufacturing slowdowns—this time, by doubling up on capacitors for both sides of the ABF substrate.

June 13, 2022 by Jake Hertz

An Introduction to RISC-V—Understanding RISC’s Open ISA

This article is a primer into the basics of RISC-V. The open architecture philosophy is exposed, along with a technical description of the modular ISA, and some commercial RISC-V microprocessor implementations.

June 12, 2022 by Eduardo Corpeño

Microchip Pushes First RISC-V-based SoC FPGA to Mass Production

Microchip continues the push for RISC-V hardware by reaching milestones with its PolarFire system-on-a-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and Mi-V ecosystem.

June 10, 2022 by Jake Hertz

Silicon Lifecycle Management: Enabling Silicon Visibility Through Intelligent Analysis

Learn about silicon lifecycle management (SLM), what it is, the EDA challenges involved, how it relates to SoC systems, and its overall benefits.

June 09, 2022 by Stephen Crosher and Steve Pateras, Synopsys

PCB Layout Challenges—Improve Your Switched-mode Power Supply Designs

Switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) appear simple to route on your PCB, but are they? This article identifies two noise sources and simple fixes to improve your EMC performance.

June 02, 2022 by Adrian Gibbons

Ep. 46 | Microsoft VP Marcus Fontoura on Architecting Azure, the “World’s Computer”

Behind the scenes with a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Corporate VP who discusses the software, hardware, and infrastructure behind Azure cloud computing, the software-defined data center, and what makes the most efficient, sustainable data centers in the world.

May 24, 2022 by Daniel Bogdanoff

AMD SOM Kit Propels Robotics Beyond Custom Designs

Keen to free industrial robotics from the burdens of custom design, AMD has launched a SOM-based starter kit that puts ROS 2 and predefined interface apps into play.

May 17, 2022 by Jeff Child

GaN-on-Silicon for RF Applications? ST and MACOM Claim Success

STMicroelectronics and MACOM announced the successful production of RF GaN-on-Silicon technology, hoping to solve GaN production challenges for RF components.

May 16, 2022 by Jake Hertz

Innovative Interconnects: The Future of Chiplet-based Processors?

Many of the world's largest chipmakers like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA are investing in chiplets. But heterogeneous processors are not without their flaws.

April 18, 2022 by Arjun Nijhawan

“First” Silicon-based Qubits at Scale Narrows Gap for Quantum Computing

Intel and QuTech have teamed up for scaling and solving quantum technology challenges with the success of the first fabrication of silicon-based qubits.

April 18, 2022 by Jake Hertz

Ep. 43 | Mark Papermaster: The EE and Exec Behind Apple, IBM, Cisco, and AMD’s Success

What hasn’t Mark Papermaster accomplished? He’s the engineer and exec who impacted Apple’s iPhones and iPods, the IBM Power PC, and has led AMD's remarkable rejuvenation from a company that “may have lost their way” to surpassing Intel’s market cap.

April 12, 2022 by Daniel Bogdanoff

The Pros and Cons of Moving EDA to the Cloud

Taking EDA to the cloud, Synopsys’ new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings for EDA and IC design raise the question: is cloud computing a good choice for chip design?

April 11, 2022 by Jake Hertz

2D Semiconductors May Be Key to 3D Integration, Say Stanford Researchers

New research indicates how 2D semiconductors could advance monolithic 3D integration in a scalable way—prolonging Moore's law in the process.

April 02, 2022 by vishvachi

Finding Your EE “Why” With Thy Tran: The “Semiconductor Gypsy”

In honor of Woman’s History Month, AAC talked with Micron’s Thy Tran who has made waves in the industry, inspiring new engineers and helping to bring groundbreaking DRAM technology to life.

March 31, 2022 by Kimber Wymore

Ep. 42 | Groq CEO and Ex-Googler Jonathan Ross on the Petaflop AI Chip and First Ever TPU

Groq’s chip architecture is something all electrical engineers will drool over. It not only focuses on high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), but it can do 1 PetaOp—1 quadrillion operations per second. “Which is four commas, not three... yeah,” Groq’s CEO Jonathan Ross emphasizes while confirming it is indeed 300X faster than NVIDIA’s chip. This “successful college dropout” designed Google’s TPU (tensor processing unit) and came up with $10B ideas at X - the moonshot factory, but “never in a million years” thought he’d be Groq’s CEO.

March 29, 2022 by Daniel Bogdanoff

Chiplet Design Hopes to Rise Up as a Contender for Sidestepping Moore’s Law

To overcome Moore's Law and die-to-die interconnection issues, the world’s top companies are turning to chiplet design for their next-generation computing hardware.

March 28, 2022 by Jake Hertz

Photonic Wire Bonding Process Could Open Door to More Photonic Electronics

As photonics technology seeks its niche in the industry, one hurdle to overcome is a scalable fabrication process. One technique called photonic wire bonding (PWB) hopes to push photonics forward.

March 26, 2022 by Abdulwaliy Oyekunle

Nvidia’s Hopper Architecture Leaps in With Tons of New Tech for HPC and AI

Continuing to unpack NVIDIA's GTC Conference releases, one stand out was the Hopper architecture targeting high-performance computing (HPC) and AI/machine learning.

March 24, 2022 by Jake Hertz

Designing to Protect 5G Macro Base Stations for High Reliability

In this article, learn about protecting three major base station systems, the baseband unit, the power supply, and the backup battery system.

March 10, 2022 by Todd Phillips, Littelfuse

AAC Exclusive: A Chat With IBM Researchers Who Built the New “VTFET” Transistor

In December, IBM and Samsung announced a new transistor architecture said to defy conventional FinFETs. We spoke with two of IBM's leading researchers on this project for details.

March 07, 2022 by Ingrid Fadelli