Liz Allan

Illinois

Associate Editor at Semiconductor Engineering

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Articles

AR/VR Glasses Taking Shape

3 weeks ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

More augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) wearables are coming, but how they are connected, and where image and other data is processed, are still in flux. Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, for example, look like classic eyeglasses, but they rely on a tethered smart phone for such functions as taking pictures, AI voice assistance, and object identification.
Mobile Chip Challenges In The AI Era

3 weeks ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Leading smart phone vendors are struggling to keep pace with the rising compute and power demands of localized generative AI, standard phone functions, and the need to move more data back and forth between handsets and the cloud. In addition to edge functions, such as facial recognition and other on-device apps, phones must accommodate a continuous stream of new communications protocols, and systems and applications updates.
Security Risks Mount For Aerospace, Defense Applications

1 month ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Supply chain and hardware security vulnerabilities affect all industries, but they pose additional risks for the defense sector. Over-manufacturing and re-manufacturing allow chips from friendly nations to end up in the weapons of adversaries. And side-channel attacks such as power analysis or fault injection, as well as internet-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, provide a means to steal sensitive data or interfere with critical infrastructure.
Radiation, Temperature, Power Challenges For Chips In Space

1 month ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Mission-critical hardware used in space is not supposed to fail at all, because lives may be lost in addition to resources, availability, performance, and budgets. For space applications, failure can occur due to a range of factors, including the weather on the day of launch, human error, environmental conditions, unexpected or unknown hazards and degradation of parts to chemical factors, aging, and radiation.
Extra Safety Measures Needed For Aerospace ICs

1 month ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Aerospace safety requirements and standards vary depending on whether a spacecraft is manned or unmanned, and how crucial the mission is. The defense contractors designing these spacecraft take various approaches to functional safety based on how critical a component is for the mission to succeed. While losing a few images during an Earth-bound observation may not matter, losing a satellite can be a major setback. And absolutely nobody wants to lose a jet or a rocket.
Stakes Are High For Aerospace, Defense IC Designs

2 months ago | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Chips destined for the skies or armed forces need extra everything. They require higher layers of abstraction to simulate all the moving parts in the field, high-reliability testing for harsh environments, in addition to system-level test. They also need radiation-hardening and ceramic materials for space, extra safety layers, and advanced security techniques. As in the automotive sector, the safety-critical designation means lives are at risk.
Wearable Connectivity, AI Enable New Use Cases

Mar 6, 2025 | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

The sensing and processing technology used in smart phones, watches, and rings is starting to be being deployed in a wide variety of wearable devices, ranging from those that fill the gap between sports and med tech, to haptic devices to assist the visually impaired and AR/VR glasses. Emerging applications include payment, building, and factory wearables. Most of these devices process signals, then plug into AI and ML tools to analyze the data at the edge, on a phone, or in the cloud.
Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Feb. 25

Feb 25, 2025 | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Feb. 25 NVM-CIM accelerators; AI HW energy; TSV faults; Si/SiGe multi-layer stacks; BPR to suppress substrate leakage in CFETs; small-pitch interconnects; DRAM read disturbance; HW-aligned sparse attention architecture.
Med Tech Morphs Into Consumer Wearables

Feb 6, 2025 | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Doctors have been using advanced technology for years, but the growing trend is for consumers to use devices at home and have direct access to their data. Watches and rings that were once primarily used for counting steps or registering sleep patterns can now read blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen, body temperature, and other early signs of illness.
Universities Augment Curricula To Boost Engineering Graduates Employability

Feb 5, 2025 | semiengineering.com | Liz Allan

Increasing numbers of universities are offering semiconductor courses in their engineering programs, and also in math, physics, and business degrees. Most universities now offer a broad foundation so students can pivot to other industries during cyclical downturns, or when technology and science create entirely new and potentially lucrative opportunities, such as generative AI, advanced packaging, and at some point in the future, the rollout of quantum computing.