NoCs In 3D Space


A network on chip (NoC) has become an essential piece of technology that enables the complexity of chips to keep growing, but when designs go 3D, or when third-party chiplets become pervasive, it's not clear how NoCs will evolve or what the impact will be on chiplet architectures. A NoC enables data to move between heterogeneous computing elements, while at the same time minimizing the resou... » read more

What Will That Chip Cost?


In the past, analysts, consultants, and many other experts attempted to estimate the cost of a new chip implemented in the latest process technology. They concluded that by the 3nm node, only a few companies would be able to afford them — and by the time they got into the angstrom range, probably nobody would. Much has changed over the past few process nodes. Increasing numbers of startups... » read more

Chiplets: Deep Dive Into Designing, Manufacturing, And Testing


Chiplets are a disruptive technology. They change the way chips are designed, manufactured, tested, packaged, as well as the underlying business relationships and fundamentals. But they also open the door to vast new opportunities for existing chipmakers and startups to create highly customized components and systems for specific use cases and market segments. This LEGO-like approach sounds ... » read more

Power/Performance Costs Of Securing Systems


For much of the chip industry, concerns about security are relatively new, but the requirement for protecting semiconductor devices is becoming pervasive. Unfortunately for many industries, that lesson has been learned the hard way. Security breaches have led to the loss of sensitive data, ransomware attacks that lock up data, theft of intellectual property or financial resources, and loss o... » read more

IP Becoming More Complex, More Costly


Success in the semiconductor intellectual property (IP) market requires more than a good bit of RTL. New advances mandate a complete design, implementation, and verification team, which limits the number of companies competing in this market. What constitutes an IP block has changed significantly since the concept was first introduced in the 1990s. What was initially just a piece of RTL (reg... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlined its plan for a National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) to be created using a share of the $11 billion in funds from the CHIPS Act marked for research and development. While a large portion of the CHIPS Act investment is set to boost U.S. fabs and manufacturing capabilities, the NSTC aims to also support the design side, ... » read more

Dealing With Performance Bottlenecks In SoCs


A surge in the amount of data that SoCs need to process is bogging down performance, and while the processors themselves can handle that influx, memory and communication bandwidth are straining. The question now is what can be done about it. The gap between memory and CPU bandwidth — the so-called memory wall — is well documented and definitely not a new problem. But it has not gone away... » read more

Is UCIe Really Universal?


Chiplets are rapidly becoming the means to overcome the slowing of Moore's Law, but whether one interface is capable of joining them all together isn't clear yet. The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) believes it will work, but some in the industry remain unconvinced. At least part of the problem is that interconnect standards are never truly finished. Even today, the protocols tha... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence will acquire Future Facilities, a provider of electronics cooling analysis and energy performance optimization solutions for data center design and operations using physics-based 3D digital twins. Future Facilities’ product portfolio includes an electronics thermal solution, as well as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) electronics cooling simulation technology that op... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is raising new challenges for Nvidia's proposed acquisition of Arm, suggesting in a new report that an in-depth Phase 2 investigation into the deal is warranted on competition grounds. Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA, said, “We’re concerned that Nvidia controlling Arm could create real problems for Nvidia's rivals by limiting their acce... » read more

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