Blog review: April 13

Synopsys’ Scott Durrant, Priyank Shukla, Mitch Heins, and Jigesh Patel provide a brief overview of the history of copper and optical interconnects used in data centers, the limitations of existing interconnect solutions, and the future of optical co-packaged.

Siemens’ Trey Reeser believes that not only is it necessary for semiconductor companies to address product safety and security for security-critical markets, but they must also be prepared to provide assurance and proof of compliance to the customer.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan reviews the Matter specification, an effort to standardize connectivity in the currently fragmented smart home market and facilitate interoperability for developers and consumers.

Pierre-Alexandre Bou-Ach d’Arm argues that technology roadmaps can no longer focus solely on performance and must begin to make decarbonization a priority, starting with measuring energy and power accurately and consistent.

Joan Asselot of Coventor examines genetic algorithms, which are used to find the optimal solution to a mathematically difficult real-world problem, and how they can be applied to MEMS device design.

Ansys’ Raja Badrinarayanan suggests building a digital twin of electric vehicle batteries to help assess the long-term effects of temperature, climate and weather exposure, usage patterns, driving speeds, high and low states of charge and electrical current variations on battery designs.

SEMI’s Margaret Kindling highlights several women who have had a major impact on the microelectronics industry, from oscillators to superconductors.

Memory analyst Jim Handy checks out content-addressable memory, or CAM, and how its ability to do something other memory chips can’t make it useful for particular applications.

In addition, find blogs from the latest Automotive, Security & Pervasive Computing and Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletters:

Siemens EDA’s Lee Harrison explains why modeling and testing are so important to securing self-driving cars.

Rambus’ Bart Stevens focuses on threat mitigation standards for automotive electronics.

Pavithra C. Suriyanarayanan and Srini Krishnaswami of Synopsys review product design best practices for functional safety.

Ralph Grundler of Flex Logix emphasizes the need for obfuscation to keep designs confidential.

AMD’s Giulio Corradi looks at how to handle the huge amount of data required for Industry 4.0 analytics.

Cadence’s Veena Parthan shows why drone aerodynamics can be improved with CFD simulations and real-world testing.

Synopsys’ Jerry Lotto outlines some of the less common considerations for evaluating a system’s suitability for high-performance workloads.

Melvin Lee of Onto Innovation shows how an external inspection system and software for detecting and classifying defects increases ABF substrate yield.

Harshitha Kodali of Siemens describes an automated approach for memory library mapping and validation, DFT insertion, and DFT area optimization.

Teradyne’s Christos Pantelidis presents a mixed statistical model to assess a common image sensor defect.