ADLINK Technology Inc, a global leader in edge computing, introduces two new modules in the 6-CH EU Series digital I/O – the ECAT-4XMO motion control and trigger module, and the ECAT-TRG4 trigger modules. The new modules are a dynamic extension to ADLINK's EtherCAT System and are designed to perfectly complement the EU Series, enabling higher performance in automatic assembly, test, and inspection equipment across a multitude of applications including cell phone glass inspection, battery cell assembly, camera lens assembly and test and glue dispensing machinery, as well as inspection equipment.The ECAT-4XMO motion control and trigger module is a 4-channel control and high-speed trigger module that connects to both EtherCAT and non-EtherCAT motors, including stepper motors, linear motors, direct drive and AC. Advanced functions of the ECAT-4XMO include high precision motion interpolation, continuous contouring, axes synchronization, point table for circuit limit and 2D compensation. The superior performance of the ECAT-TRG4 includes high speed position comparison trigger (4 channels, 10 MHz linear/table), pulse outputs (12 MHZ), encode inputs (20 MHz) and support for encoder re-driver operation. The flexible expansion interface of the ECAT-TRG4 allows easy connection to cameras and air guns."Industrial automation equipment, depending on different usage conditions, needs to control pulse-type motors and communication-type motors at the same time, as well as trigger control based on different signals," said Simon You, Director, Smart Machine Business Product Center, ADLINK. "Generally, it takes separate systems to control different types of motors, which consumes larger floor space, and increases maintenance efforts and costs. With ADLINK's highly integrated and compatible EtherCAT solutions, users are allowed to control pulse motors and communication motors via a single system at the same time, fulfilling the demands of many trigger control applications."In addition, ADLINK offers an all-in-one automation software (APS SDK), which serves as a uniform interface to access all ADLINK machine automation products. With APS SDK, users can operate ADLINK motion products in a simple and consistent way, minimizing the reprogramming hassles of adding or removing devices. APS Function Library also allows existing motion control users to easily upgrade to EtherCAT-based solutions without complicated program modifications or application redevelopment.The new modules feature sliding side-by-side installation and screwless design, to reduce installation costs, and support nearly all field applications in a smart factory. In test applications, the EtherCAT system delivered total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of up to 10% and up to 30% increases in productivity.ADLINK launches new EtherCAT modules, completing the EtherCAT solution for industrial automation

Coretronic Intelligent Robotics Corporation (CIRC), a subsidiary of Coretronic group, delivers a full lineup of commercial drones servicing different applications, including "Hummer" for mobile patrols, "Kestrel" for security and inspection, "Falcon" for surveying and mapping, and "Pelican" for logistics. Integrated with in-house developed fleet management platform (SkyWatch) and AI data analysis platform (Insight), CIRC has provided the total solution with intelligent information to users to realize the automation and digitalization.According to Grand View Research, commercial UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) market is expected to grow significantly in the next three to five years per accelerating the applications of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the gradual relaxation of regulations. It is expected to reach US$129.23 billion by 2025 with the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 56.5%. "In recent years, countries such as Europe, the US, and Japan, have been developing their own UAV technology and industry. CIRC has designed and produced the airframe of the commercial drones, and developed the flight control system, by the teams located in Taiwan, together with the service of customized software solutions by applications. We expect to grow ourselves along with the opportunity of the commercial UAV market," said Andy Hsin, General Manager of CIRC.Furthermore, CIRC also offers Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) carriers and forklift trucks to serve the need of smart manufacturing and smart logistics, by successfully developing its cutting-edge AMR solution with 2D/3D LiDAR SLAM, achieving the simultaneous localization and 2D/3D mapping without any need of field re-layout by guided marks. CIRC AMR solution features precise positioning, safely obstacle avoidance, smart routing, and automatically switching the map, with the proprietary algorithm and capability of motion control to execute the missions accurately. With the feature of 3D visual recognition, CIRC AMR forklift dynamically recognizes the status of pallet and storage location to execute the task smoothly, and stacks the pallet with or without the racks. And the fleet is managed efficiently by the centralized console and/or local stations via handheld device to schedule the tasks and control the AMR vehicles with real-time monitoring. In addition, the fleet management system can be interfaced with the manufacturing and/or logistics management system (ERP/WMS/MES) to realize the smart manufacturing and smart logistics.Coretronic Intelligent Robotics Corporation (CIRC) delivers a variety of commercial drones and AMR solutions

The back-end semiconductor manufacturing process refers to the IC packaging and testing that people often hear about. Specifically, the process known as chip probing (CP) is conducted to test the electrical characteristics of each die on the wafer, so that dies with faulty electrical performance can be vetted before packaging, effectively reducing unnecessary manufacturing costs from faulty products.Once probing is complete, the second process is called sorting, which is a quality inspection process. The goal of sorting is to quickly distinguish the dies that meet the desired specifications from those that don't. For products that pass the sorting process, the manufacturer may have them further binned into levels 1, 2, 3, or even more levels to match the specifications needed in the production of various electronic components, while defective ones can then be subjected to follow-up repairs and adjustments.Ray Lin, ADLINK Smart Machine Product Center Manager, said that increasing sorting efficiency is without a doubt the main goal for semiconductor manufactures looking to speed up packaging and testing to quickly and accurately distinguish good dies from defective ones. The reality of the situation, however, is that speed and accuracy are often opposing goals, in which meeting one means sacrificing the other. This is the biggest conundrum that many manufactures have to face.To solve this, ADLINK developed a die sorting solution that integrates both image acquisition cards and motion control cards. This solution allows end users to easily achieve capabilities like multiaxial integration and rapid feedback response through a single coding process, striking the optimal balance between speed and accuracy.More units to be tested create demand for higher motion control efficiencyLin pointed out that several pain points exist in semiconductor sorting, with the first being the complexity of simultaneous multiaxial control. During normal sorting operations, a robotic arm will pick the die up, rotate to the destination zone, then unload the die down to the tray. This process not only involves x-axis and y-axis movements between the dies and the tray, but also z-axis movement owing to the lifting and unloading motion of the arm. Consequently, the sorting machine will have to control 6 to 8 motion axes to guide the movement of arm, the suction head, video input, and other sub-systems to integrate into different work areas. To have a traditional PLC-based control system perform these tasks would involve an extremely high level of coding complexity.Second is the fact that the commonly seen traditional PLC-based infrastructures lack flexibility and usually do not support video input. If an end user wishes to achieve fast and accurate positioning on such system, then a separate video system needs to be purchased and arduously integrated into the system, greatly ramping up development costs.Yet another issue will be caused by the demand for higher testing efficiency due to the increase in the number of units to be tested. Take this year (2021) for example, as smaller and smaller dies become more in demand, wafer manufacturing processes have also evolved, resulting in 3 to 4 times the number of dies that can be cut in comparison with that of the past. This has in turn translated into a much higher number of units to be tested. Motion control efficiency must therefore also increase to match previous production speeds, presenting a challenging task.Fusing video and motion control to easily achieve multi-work station integrationFeynman Lin, Technical Director of the ADLINK Smart Machine Product Center, said that ADLINK can provide components like image capture cards and motion control cards under a unified PC-based infrastructure to give them exceptional compatibility and usability. Furthermore, since the cards share a unified interface, end users are also much less likely to make errors during operation. More importantly, ADLINK's sorting solution is built ready-to-use and based on the premise of integrating machine vision and motion control into a single system, meaning that end users can easily perform further customization to create a single program that can coordinate between visual input and simultaneous multiaxial motion control. Not only does this help reduce development costs, but having the steps of visual location, suction loading, arm rotation, and unloading be performed as a continuous motion can contribute towards further raising packaging and testing efficiency.It is also worth noting that as the industry moves towards the age of the Internet of things (IoT), factory operations are also starting to rely on more types of ports for greater connectivity. International interface standards like USB and Ethernet jacks, are being used for connectivity to various sub-systems like machine vision, temperature sensing, and pressure detection. On this front, PC-based solutions undoubtedly provide superior flexibility and compatibility compared to traditional PLC-based industrial controllers, making PC-based solutions better at meeting clients' various needs for precision equipment.Lin stressed that ADLINK's sorting solution includes three other major functions that make it the optimal choice for solving pain points in the sorting process. First, the solution can quickly adjust itself based on real-time feedback of the detected die surface (e.g., unevenness of the surface) to reduce sorting time by 20% to 30%.Second, the solution has an "instant trigger" function that combines machine vision and multiaxial precision positioning compensation technology to swiftly sort out faulty products from non-faulty ones with a precision of up to 30nm, and separate the dies according to their levels and place them into corresponding trays. Lastly, ADLINK's sorting solution supports automated sorting processes that can be quickly adapted to different pre- and post-processing needs. For example, this solution can be made to transfer an object in the "NG die" tray to the repair station or send an object from the "Level 1 qualified die" tray to the corresponding testing machine to verify that the die truly meets Level 1 specifications. This is the main reason why ADLINK's sorting solution has been well received by end users.For the past 25 years, ADLINK has been pushing the boundaries on new solutions for the semiconductor industry as many clients have become reliant on ADLINK technologies. The Company has become the best equipment partner for major semiconductor players in the Greater China region. ADLINK's comprehensive sorting solution combines machine vision and motion control for faster, more accurate, and more productive solutions in preparation for future market demands.Ray Lin, ADLINK Smart Machinery Product Department Manager, said that increasing sorting efficiency is without a doubt the main goal for semiconductor manufactures looking to speed up packaging and testing to quickly and accurately distinguish good dies from defective ones.ADLINK can provide components like image capture cards and motion control cards under a unified PC-based infrastructure to give semiconductor exceptional compatibility and usability.

Consumer demand for higher audiovisual quality is driving the evolution of technologies behind LCD displays. Specifically, mini-LEDs, with their superior contrast and color gradation performance, have emerged in the field of display backlights. With a strong R&D foundation in the field of mini-LED technology, Macroblock recently launched a series of mini-LED backlight driver ICs that correspond to various LCD display sizes. According to Chris Chen, Macroblock backlight product manager, the company can help clients create the most suitable products tailored to the needs of different groups in the market.Chen further stated that while the earliest backlighting in LCD displays used cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL), companies later switched to LED-backlit for their purer white lights that enhance the color gamut of the display. In recent years, breakthroughs in mini-LED technology have also led to companies attempting to adapt mini-LEDs to be used as backlight despite the higher costs. The newest iPad Pro released by Apple in April 2021 also uses this technology, anchoring the status of mini-LEDs in the backlight market.By looking at the actions taken by Apple and other companies, Chen mentioned that mini-LEDs may well become the mainstream technology for LCD display backlighting, driving an increase in market demand accordingly. In response to this trend, Macroblock has released a series of backlight driver IC solutions for small- to medium-sized and medium- to large-sized LCD displays.Chen also pointed out that small- to medium-sized LCDs tend to be found on consumer products like laptops and tablets with limited interior space and shorter product development cycles. Therefore, the Macroblock MBI6322 integrates peripheral components like the built-in switch (MOSFET) into a single unit. The integration simplifies the internal PCB design, reduces the overall cost, and lowers the error rate during PCB mounting. Another benefit of a design with more integrated wiring and layering is that it cuts down on the PCB layout review time during product development. Furthermore, engineers can choose from commercially available timing control ICs or bridge ICs compatible with the MBI6322 to control the dimming signals of the mini-LED panels without the need for an MCU, keeping the small- to medium-sized LCD displays thin and elegant.Besides driver ICs with integrated MOSFETs, Macroblock also offers designs without this integration. This type of design can be further divided into two other types based on whether the driver IC itself still controls the external MOSFET. The MBI6334 and MBI6353 are two types of driver ICs that can control the external MOSFETs. The MBI6334 is the same as the MBI6322 in that they are primarily used to control the backlighting in small- to medium-sized LCD displays without the need for an external MCU, saving potential software coding time. The MBI6334 also utilizes rectangular BGA packaging and is compliant with the Video Electronics Standards Association's (VESA) recommended regulations for timing control circuit boards of laptop, making it a perfect fit for narrow PCBs. On the other hand, the MBI6353 is primarily used in medium- to large-sized LCD displays. Its high-current tolerant design makes it suitable for lighting boards with a large number of LEDs connected in parallel such as TVs, PIDs, monitors, etc.There is also the MBI6328 which has external MOSFET that is not controlled by the driver IC. The MOSFET is instead controlled by a MCU. Macroblock is currently working with various MCU manufacturers to ensure smoother product development. The MBI6328 is a driver IC suitable for medium- to large-sized LCD displays with more than 1,000 dimming zones that allow displays to provide ultra-fine HDR effects. Moreover, the high voltage tolerance of the MBI6328 allows it to be used when multiple backlight LEDs are connected in series.Lastly, Chen indicated that Macroblock not only has a strong R&D foundation regarding mini-LED backlighting, the company is also working with Elan Microelectronics to build a complete industry ecosystem. With support from partners in different fields, Macroblock plans to expand the applications of its mini-LED backlight driver ICs to areas like vehicles, laptops, and tablets. The company also provides comprehensive after-sales services to help customers shorten their development time and create high-quality LCD displays that meet market demands.Chris Chen, Macroblock backlight product manager, pointed out that mini-LEDs will become a mainstream technology for LCD display backlightingMacroblock's mini-LED backlight driver ICs are designed for various LCD display sizes and can help clients create the best productsDifferent LCD displays require special backlight driver ICs with varying designs

NVIDIA has continued to innovate tools and platforms for developing autonomous driving applications and has developed a growing ecosystem of automakers, suppliers and startups worldwide.When asked about the current status of the self-driving industry and challenges that still need to be addressed, NVIDIA Vice President and General Manager of Automotive, Ali Kani, noted that building an AV is a lot harder than most people originally anticipated.Since AVs are still automobiles, which are complex systems that are safety critical and move very fast, designing computer architecture as well as related robotic and AI systems to ensure safety is one of the biggest challenges of our time.Because of these reasons, the industry still needs more time and investment to deepen their AV development. NVIDIA's role is to provide the best and the most open platform to the industry for developers to build their AVs.NVIDIA has some customers that wish to develop whole applications themselves. For this type of customer, NVIDIA offers high-performance chips that are programmable and based on a single architecture, so they are able to adopt the chips across all different segments of their AVs without wasting any extra time and development resources.For customers that do not have the resources to build AVs by themselves, NVIDIA is also able to assist them in developing autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit applications.To serve all different kinds of customers, NVIDIA has built its platform in a modular style, allowing customers to pick only the parts they need.As an example, NVIDIA is working with Mercedes Benz to help the automaker develop active safety, parking and autonomous driving applications for its upcoming fleets.In addition to the NVIDIA DRIVE in-vehicle platform, Ali Kani noted that the company also offers the DGX AI computing platform for clients to train their in-house developed perception networks on and the DRIVE Constellation and DRIVE Sim simulation platform, which enables developers to train and validate autonomous vehicles in the virtual world before real-world deployment.Beyond that, many of the company's products, such as its GPUs for professional visualization applications, are also commonly used by auto companies' CAD engineers.NVIDIA also helps build auto configurators to create virtual showrooms via its real-time ray tracing technology. The virtual showrooms allow buyers to customize the interior of the automobiles they wish to purchase.During GTC 2021, NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang also played a video showing the factory of future, which is an automobile manufacturing facility that NVIDIA helped BMW build, leveraging its Omniverse platform to enable automated production lines.NVIDIA's Jarvis conversational AI technology is also being implemented by automakers for automated speech systems. NVIDIA's Maxine can also be applied into automobiles to create in-car conferencing services.Expanding more on NVIDIA's simulation capabilities, Ali Kani said that simulation plays an important role in the training and validation of AVs. To create a development flow that is efficient, simulation is a must, since it is difficult for AVs to experience all possible scenarios in real life.Ali Kani noted that simulation is needed to expand the coverage of the AV trainings, so it can experience different weather and traffic conditions. Through simulation, AVs are able to encounter road events that rarely happen, and even go through the same events' multiple times.NVIDIA has built its entire simulation platform on Omniverse, as there is no other engine available that support the needs of AV simulation, since it requires physically accurate photorealistic images to train networks.In the last few months, NVIDIA has announced the adoption of DRIVE Orin by top-tier automaker Volvo Cars together with several new energy vehicle brands including NIO, Li Auto, SAIC and Vietnam-based Vinfast.In the level-4 and level-5 space, NVIDIA has GM's Cruise building AVs on its platform in addition to Amazon's Zoox and others on the robotaxi front. Trucking is also a key market for the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, and the company is working closely with leading players including TuSimple, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, Plus and Einride, to name a few.Ali Kani also mentioned the importance for automakers to embrace a software-defined strategy. In the traditional auto industry, after a car is sold, the automaker can no longer generate more income from the vehicle. But with a software-defined strategy, additional subscriptions and services offer an opportunity for automakers to increase revenue.With a software-defined strategy, a car's value no longer lies in the hardware, but now resides in the software. Automakers can continue to provide updates to their automobiles' AI systems to add more functions and services over the life of the cars, making them smarter and boosting their value.Automakers' business perspective will also change from units sold to the fleets they manage, as all the automobiles sold can still bring new business opportunities to the makers, thanks to the software updates.Ali Kani also provided extra detail about the DRIVE Atlan SoC, which was announced during GTC 2021.From a performance perspective, DRIVE Atlan, which features over 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), making it a true data center on wheels.To be truly software-defined, an AI system needs to constantly be updated over the lifetime of the car, making the system's networking and security crucial.For that, DRIVE Atlan will feature next-generation CPU, GPU and BlueField DPU technology in order to provide data center performance, security and networking and automotive safety for AVs.See a replay of Ali Kani's talk at COMPUTEX 2021 Forum, "Transforming the Transportation Industry with AI."NVIDIA Vice President and General Manager of Automotive, Ali Kani

NVIDIA, with the acquisition of Arm and its keen push in AI applications, has been aggressively releasing innovations to help improve datacenters' computing capability over AI workloads.During Computex 2021, NVIDIA unveiled several new hardware and software including NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs, NVIDIA-Certified Systems and NVIDIA Base Command Platform, for datacenter servers.The BlueField-2 is a data processing unit, offering high-speed networking, programmable Arm cores, hardware-accelerated encryption/decryption and additional offloads for networking, security and storage.As for how servers can benefit from the BlueField-2 DPU in performance boost, NVIDIA's Head of Enterprise Computing Manuvir Das explained that at the current state, some of the CPUs in servers can use up to around 30% of their capacities to handle the systems' average administration tasks, instead of supporting the operation of applications.The BlueField-2 DPU is designed to help servers handle the infrastructure works and free up the occupied resources at the CPUs and with the adoption of the DPUs, companies now need fewer servers to achieve the same workload since each server is able to do more work.It also works differently from accelerator cards. Comparing to GPU-based accelerator cards, which are used to accelerate application calculations, the DPU is primarily accelerating the networking activities between servers and storage as well as servers' I/O activities.The acceleration over the networking activities is also an advantage of the BlueField DPU as most other competing products available in the market are simply looking to move the workload to the chip without providing any acceleration.The DPU's Arm-based CPU cores and dedicated silicon chips also play keys in the acceleration for some parts of the network traffic, noted Das, adding that NVIDIA is also seeking to integrate its DPU and GPU into one chip in the long term.NVIDIA has partnered with many server companies including ASUS, GIGABYTE, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Dell Technologies and Supermicro to release server products equipped with the DPUs.Since the DPU's job is mainly to help take workload off servers' CPUs, the hardware can be applied to servers for all kinds of industries and applications.However, security works of servers can particularly benefit from the DPU. With security growing more important to the cloud computing industry, the DPU is able to offload the heavy resource consuming task from CPUs.For NVIDIA-Certified Systems, the company has cooperated with server vendors to create a template for server architectures. The vendors need to have the correct setups and configurations of NVIDIA's hardware in their servers, and pass the benchmark in order to be certified, Das noted.With the NVIDIA certification, buyers of the certified servers are guaranteed of AI computing performance. They are also able to obtain support from NVIDIA on any performance issues with their software, as the chance of having issues with the hardware has already been minimized by following the certification guidelines.NVIDIA is also planning to expand the certification services to cover Arm-based servers in 2022. For AI applications, most workload is handled by servers' GPUs so vendors usually prefer equipping lighter CPUs for their systems to cut down power consumption. And Arm-based processors, which have been known for its low power usage, are perfect for vendors to build such a solution.NVIDIA has seen requests from vendors for providing assistance in creating Arm-based server solution and though the x86 architecture is still the mainstream of the server industry at the moment, NVIDIA still tries to satisfy customers' demand for niche applications, Das stated.NVIDIA's Base Command Platform is designed for large-scale, multi-user and multi-team AI development workflows hosted either on premises or in the cloud. It enables numerous researchers and data scientists to simultaneously work on accelerated computing resources, helping enterprises maximize the productivity of both their expert developers and their valuable AI infrastructure.Base Command Platform was originally a system used by NVIDIA internally for the company's engineering teams to share their latest contents and work progresses among data scientists for AI projects.With the platform growing mature and clients also having demand for such a system, NVIDIA has decided to make it available to customers.NVIDIA is responsible for the maintenance of Base Command Platform in terms of both software and hardware infrastructure, while the services' subscription and promotion will be handled by NetApp, Das said.When comes to the question of what the barriers to AI adoption at mainstream enterprises are today, Das pointed out that a key challenge that NVIDIA is seeing at the moment is the challenge of coordinating between data scientists, who are experts in AI training and models, and IT engineers, who specialize in traditional applications such as SAP and VMware. NVIDIA is hoping Base Command Platform will help smooth out the issue.As AI computing servers become more popularized among datacenters worldwide, Das expects volumes of NVIDIA-Certified servers to be a good indication for the penetration of AI-ready hardware. At the moment, most datacenter operators still acquire servers and GPU-accelerator cards separately, but the certification program should boost datacenter operators' demand for complete NVIDIA-certified server sets in the years to come.However, since servers' replacement cycle usually takes a couple of years, it may still require several years of replacement cycles for more mainstream datacenter servers to run AI computing.Das also shared the latest progresses of NVIDIA's projects with VMware including over vSphere and Project Monterey. VMware in March updated its vSphere with support to NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, but at the time, NVIDIA was only able to provide the early access version of its software to customers.This summer, VMware will bring another update to vSphere, and this time, NVIDIA will be able to provide the first general available version of the AI Enterprise software suite, allowing customers to move their development to production.Project Monterey is a case that NVIDIA is working with VMware to have VMware's software running on the BlueField DPU. Since VMware's hypervisor is completely running on CPUs, the project is aiming to have the DPU handling the hypervisor to reduce CPUs' workload.See a replay of NVIDIA COMPUTEX 2021 Keynote to get more details of NVIDIA Enterprise AI announcements.NVIDIA's Head of Enterprise Computing Manuvir Das

AEWIN announces partnership with D8AI to accelerate the arrival of AI empowered future. With continued growth in smart applications, D8AI solutions enable companies of all sizes to leverage the power of AI to provide better value and improve organizational efficiency.D8AI Chatbot solution is designed as enterprise-grade customer care AI that can provide relevant and timely assistance or response. It can integrate into many existing messaging and social media platforms, with a single unified management backend. This allows easy management and monitoring of user interactions.NLP Document Recognizer utilizes a proprietary AI enabled data extraction technology which can transform multiple optical and text data types simultaneously. These formats include Chinese, English, barcode, QR code, and other digital data. It can help organizations speed up digitization of paper documents for processing and storage in the database. It utilizes deep learning and computer vision in unison to find structure in data, which can be used for predictive analytics.Through this partnership, AEWIN has gained profound insights in AI technology and allowed us to customize BIOS and firmware for optimized results, as well as carefully chosen hardware specifications tuned for exacting needs."D8AI solutions offer an attractive option for enterprises and organizations to leverage the latest technologies to augment their internal processes. AEWIN's computing platforms are quintessential part of the equation," said Charles Lin, CEO at AEWIN. "With a balance of hardware and firmware optimization, we are able to achieve substantial performance gains. We are proud to present this solution to the market to exemplify what can be accomplished with tight cooperation between hardware and software partners.""AEWIN has been an indispensable partner. Their hardware and BIOS tuning expertise give us the computing performance we sought. AEWIN's hardware provides significant advantages over other servers on the market," said Richard Sheng, president and CTO of D8AI. "Through our partnership, we have gained a reliable partner that can provide insights to hardware designs and architectures that directly feed back into our software architecture to take advantage of the latest hardware innovations."D8AI user interfaceD8AI solution

The digital transformation driven by the convergence of AI and 5G has made data a key enabler of economic development. As a result, in addition to requiring higher computing performance, memory and storage components are playing an increasingly important role for various computing architectures. At 2021 Computex Taipei, Micron Technology unveiled several new products based on its leading 176-layer NAND and 1α (1-alpha) DRAM technology. Meanwhile, Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron President and CEO, and Raj Hazra, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compute and Networking Business Unit, also gave speeches, explaining how the innovation of memory and storage can drive the expansion of AI applications, in a bid to realize the unlimited possibilities from data center to intelligent edge devices.The potential of data economySanjay Mehrotra pointed out in a keynote speech titled "Innovation for the Data Economy: Why today's infrastructure innovation brings data to life, powering insights for all" that technology innovations plays the central role in enabling enterprises to seize with accelerating data-driven insights, and drive the full potential of the data economy. According to McKinsey's study, advanced data analytics technologies will add $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and the added value is driven by our ability to make better and faster decisions from the massive amount of data."Innovation is occurring more rapidly than ever before," he said. "AI and 5G are at the heart of this change, and the combination of these two technologies is able to create newfound opportunities for the post-pandemic world."First, with the rapid development of AI, by 2025, it is estimated that 75% of enterprises will have shifted from piloting AI solutions to operationalizing them, bringing comprehensive changes in all industries. The pervasive AI applications also stimulated the transformation of computing platforms, so that data analysis can be carried out better and faster. With its ultra-high bandwidth, multitude of connections, and low-latency capabilities, 5G will fuel the growth of the intelligent edge of our network, providing real-time access and process of data.Sanjay Mehrotra emphasized, "All data comes to life through memory and storage, where Micron shines. This growth and transformation presents an opening for technology innovation to deliver bold new solutions for data center, network infrastructure, and intelligent edge devices."The world's first 176-layer NANDsUnderpinning by three strategies, including advanced process node technology, product innovation, and building ecosystem, Micron aims to take the lead in the market. During the speech, Mehrotra announced volume production of the company's first PCIe Gen4 solid-state drives (SSDs) built with the world's first 176-layer NAND. It will be able to support the PC market for data-intensive workloads with higher performance, lower power consumption and a more elaborate size.In addition, Micron is shipping LPDDR4x in volume on its leading 1α node this month, quickly following the introduction of initial 1α node DRAM products in January 2021. The company has also completed validation of its 1α-based DDR4 on leading data center platforms, including 3rd Generation AMD EPYC. Both are in volume production in Micron's advanced DRAM fabrication facilities in Taiwan, including its newly established A3 facility in Taichung.For automotive applications, Micron announced that it is sampling 128GB and 256GB densities of its 96-layer NAND as part of its new portfolio of UFS 3.1 managed NAND products.The key to AI innovationAs the industry moves towards the goal of AI ubiquity, what are the challenges to be solved ahead? Raj Hazra explained the importance of memory innovation for expanding AI applications in a speech titled "Memory Is at the Heart of AI Innovation" and at Micron's Computex pre-show press conference.He pointed out that traditional server architectures were built around the needs of the CPU. With the rise of data-intensive workloads like AI, HPC and advanced analytics, we tried to add more CPU or heterogeneous cores to cope with these new challenges. But memory innovation has not kept pace with compute growth, which makes memory the bottleneck in compute architectures.Therefore, memory and storage are becoming central to platform innovation. This is why, when the industry defined the next standard for DRAM innovation it centered that innovation - for the first time - on data center requirements and not client platform needs.DDR5 is a once-in-a-decade platform innovation delivering much-needed advancements in memory bandwidth, density and data center capability. In order to speed market adoption of DDR5, Micron has made significant momentum with its Technology Enablement Program (TEP) for DDR5, which was launched in 2020. The program has now engaged more than 250 design and technical leaders from more than 100 industry leaders.The Future of MemoryApart from DDR5, Raj Hazra said that in order to support AI training and high-performance computing workloads, we should renovate the existing CPU-centric platform by providing breakthrough memory capacity to meet the application requirements of data centers.In light of this, Micron announced its support of Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, which aims to transform fundamental compute architectures, enabling new connectivity between compute logic and memory across CPU, GPU and other accelerator technologies, as well as configuring resources upon workloads in real time."Memory must be closer to compute units for faster read and write which can significantly improve the power efficiency. With the introduction of the new open CXL standard, the industry is on the cusp of realizing fully composable data center architectures, enabling to connect CPUs to GPUs and accelerators, storage, memory and networking."In particular, as AI models become increasingly larger, whether it is scaling up or scaling out, we are now facing various challenges such as power consumption, cost, latency, and capacity. By implementing a new memory hierarchy, including near memory such as high-bandwidth in-package direct attached memory, and far memory such as CXL attached memory, great improvement will occur to the processing performance in the hot data zone.Raj Hazra said that, with this architectural innovation, the future composable data center will be optimized infrastructures that can tackle any number of data-centric workloads - from AI training to simulation and modeling to database management and analytics. Actively developing CXL products, Micron is now arming with comprehensive memory and storage product portfolios to meet the various needs of AI computing.Please visit Micron website for more.Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra

Global Unichip Corp. (GUC), the Advanced ASIC Leader, announced today that it has successfully taped out AI/HPC/Networking CoWoS Platform with 7.2 Gbps HBM3 Controller and PHY, GLink-2.5D and third-party 112G-LR SerDes IPs. The main die of the platform contains the world's first HBM3 Controller and PHY IP with a record-high 7.2 Gbps performance. The platform meets strict signal and power integrity (SI and PI) requirements of 112G-LR SerDes routed through TSMC CoWoS technologies.GUC's GLink-2.5D interface enables high bandwidth, low latency, low power interconnection of several dies on the CoWoS platform. The success of the tape out breaks the limits of memory bandwidth and unleashes new potential for scalable Artificial Intelligence (AI), High Performance Computing (HPC), and Networking multi-die solutions.The platform represents real AI/HPC/Networking applications usage cases which require the high flexibility of SoC floorplans and HBM3 PHY/Controller arrangements on the main die vs. HBM3 memory on interposers. GUC's patent-pending solution allows HBM3 bus routing between PHY and memory at any angle while keeping the same signal width and space as in traditional straight HBM bus routing. It allows shorter routing, better signal integrity, higher speed and lower power consumption than traditional zig-zag HBM bus routing. Our products can support up to 10 HBM3 memories connected to two SoC dies by using splitting PHY technology. GUC's patent-pending solution enables the splitting of the central HBM3 memory bus to PHYs, located on two SoC dies to allow full HBM3 utilization in 2:6 or 2:10 SoC:HBM3 memory use cases.GUC's design for CoWoS and interposer supports 112G-LR SerDes signaling by adopting in-house interposer design flow and the latest TSMC CoWoS technology. To represent typical AI/HPC/Networking chip conditions, multiple instances of HBM3, 112G-LR SerDes and GLink-2.5D IPs were integrated into this big die CoWoS platform with high power consumption. GUC implemented a high coverage DFT solution for both wafer-level and final production tests. The DFT solution takes advantage of HBM3 and GLink-2.5D lane redundancy and repair to maximize CoWoS yield."We are proud to be the world's first company to tape out a full-scale 7.2 Gbps HBM3 controller and PHY IP. GUC has again demonstrated industry leadership in offering a total solution for advanced packaging technology.", said Dr. Ken Chen, president of GUC. "We have complemented our HBM2E PHY/Controller, GLink-2.5D and GLink-3D IP portfolio with HBM3. Together with CoWoS, InFO_oS, 3DIC design expertise, package design, electrical and thermal simulations, DFT and production testing, we provide cutting edge solutions to our customers and assist them to achieve even greater success in their products and businesses.""We integrated multiple instances of HBM3, 112G-LR SerDes and GLink-2.5D IPs and much highly complex toggling logic in 280 mm2, 400W die and assembled multiple dies and HBM3 memories on a CoWoS platform. It validates our IPs at large scale AI/HPC/Networking chip conditions and brings the high confidence of our IPs robust operation to high scale products." said Igor Elkanovich, CTO of GUC. "We used our multi-lane 112Gbps package design expertise together with silicon-correlated high-speed interposer design flow to validate 112Gbps over the latest CoWoS solution."Key features of the GUC's AI/HPC/Networking CoWoS Platform:*World 1st full functional HBM3 Controller and PHY at 7.2 Gbps*CoWoS interposer and package meet tight 112G-LR SerDes requirements *GLink-2.5D interface connecting multiple dies over CoWoS*280 mm2 single die with 400W configurable power consumption and multiple dies assembly on CoWoS together with HBM3 memories *GUC's patent-pending interposer routing to support any angle zig-zag routing, and split HBM3 PHY into two SoCs usage *Full DFT solution for both wafer test and final test of assembled dies including HBM3 and GLink-2.5D lane redundancy and repairTo learn more about GUC's HBM3/2E, GLink-2.5D/3D IP portfolio and InFO/CoWoS/3DIC total solution, please contact your GUC sales representative directly or email guc_sales@guc-asic.com

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought a massive change to the world. People are connected by digital data on an unprecedented scale. A part of our life takes place in a virtual environment and the world is greatly transformed by things like digital workplace, virtual learning, mobile web, cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT), indicating how smart life has truly become the new normal."Smart homes, smart cities, and smart manufacturing compose a smart life environment in which we are living. As the degree of automation keeps rising, camera image sensors have become the key enabling hardware connecting the world with the computers in the network," said Benny Au, Assistant Vice President in CIS of ASM Pacific Technology (ASMPT).Benny emphasized that camera modules are an essential component of all these smart technologies. For individuals, cameras are frequently found on your smartphones, smart home appliances, drones, security control safety driving systems, and electric vehicles. For industry applications, cameras are making a significant contribution in areas including robotic, factory automation, and process control, enhancing productivity to a new height.Camera applications have undergone a rapid expansion in the last 20 years, especially in the smartphone market. In order to deliver superior image clarity within a shrinking profile, and more functionality including super-zoom and ultra-wide-angle shooting to the end-users, the traditional camera module assembly method has been replaced by more advanced optical assembly technologies like Active Alignment (AA) and Active Optical Alignment (AOA).Another big trend of camera applications is happening in the automotive industry. High-resolution cameras, combined with LiDAR and radar located in different parts of the vehicle, create a map of the surroundings, hence allowing real-time interactions between the vehicle and other users on the road.Yole's report on sensing and computing for ADAS vehiclesIn the future, the camera module market is going to keep expanding with a wide range of applications. The expectation of quality will become higher and the design of cameras will be more complex. Tough challenges like the pressure on price, technology innovation, and yield are expected to be waiting ahead. With a forethoughtful mindset and the pursuit of technology advancement, camera module providers will be well-prepared for the fast development in the future."This is when ASM Pacific Technology comes into play," noted Benny. ASMPT provides advanced manufacturing solutions in the CIS market, including the consumer market, automotive market as well as factory automation. To think one step ahead, ASMPT has been utilizing AIoT system, SkyEye in its inline solutions to achieve zero-defect manufacturing. The closed-loop systems and AI power enable exceptional quality control and cost control. With the expertise and experience in the industry, ASMPT CIS equipment products are capable of producing camera modules with high yield and productivity."To stay at the forefront of the future development of camera sensors, ASMPT has established close partnership with our key customers and end-users to provide them with our Smart Manufacturing Solutions. We hope to innovate with them to create product differentiations at low costs and superior quality. With our leading CIS platform technologies, ASMPT is ready to support our future society in the journey of digital transformation," said Benny.Please visit ASMPT official website for more articles.Smart life as the New NormalASMPT ACamLin (Advanced Automotive Camera Line) with Skyeye system