On-Chip Power Distribution Modeling Becomes Essential Below 7nm


Modeling power distribution in SoCs is becoming increasingly important at each new node and in 3D-ICs, where tolerances involving power are much tighter and any mistake can cause functional failures. At mature nodes, where there is more metal, power problems continue to be rare. But at advanced nodes, where chips are running at higher frequencies and still consuming the same or greater power... » read more

Minimizing EM/IR Impacts On IC Design Reliability And Performance


By Joel Mercier and Karen Chow As technologies and foundry process nodes continue to advance, it gets more difficult to design and verify integrated circuits (ICs). The challenges become even more apparent in 5nm and below nodes, and as the industry moves away from fin field-effect transistor (finFET) and into gate-all-around field-effect transistor (GAAFET) technologies. There are many prob... » read more

Machine Learning for VLSI CAD: A Case Study in On-Chip Power Grid Design


Abstract "With the improvement of VLSI technology, on-chip power grid design is becoming more challenging than before. In this design phase of VLSI CAD, power grids are generated in order to make power and ground connections to transistors or logic blocks. However, due to the scaling of supply voltage and increase in the number of transistors per unit area of the chip, power grid design has ... » read more

Always-On, Ultra-Low-Power Design Gains Traction


A surge of electronic devices powered by batteries, combined with ever-increasing demand for more features, intelligence, and performance, is putting a premium on chip designs that require much lower power. This is especially true for always-on circuits, which are being added into AR/VR, automotive applications with over-the-air updates, security cameras, drones, and robotics. Also known as ... » read more

Chiplets Enter The Supercomputer Race


Several entities from various nations are racing each other to deliver and deploy chiplet-based exascale supercomputers, a new class of systems that are 1,000x faster than today’s supercomputers. The latest exascale supercomputer CPU and GPU designs mix and match complex dies in advanced packages, adding a new level of flexibility and customization for supercomputers. For years, various na... » read more

Missing Interposer Abstractions And Standards


The design and analysis of an SoC based on an interposer is not for the faint of heart today, but the industry is aware of the challenges and is attempting to solve them. Until that happens, however, it will be a technique that only large companies can deploy because they need to treat everything almost as if it were a single die. The construction of large systems uses techniques, such as ab... » read more

Reducing Power Delivery Overhead


The power delivery network (PDN) is a necessary overhead that typically remains in the background — until it fails. For chip design teams, the big question is how close to the edge are they willing to push it? Or put differently, is the gain worth the pain? This question is being scrutinized in very small geometry designs, where margins can make a significant difference in device performan... » read more

Making Chip Packaging More Reliable


Packaging houses are readying the next wave of IC packages, but these products must prove to be reliable before they are incorporated into systems. These packages involve several advanced technologies, such as 2.5D/3D, chiplets and fan-out, but vendors also are working on new versions of more mature package types, like wirebond and leadframe technologies. As with previous products, packaging... » read more

Machine Learning Approach for Fast Electromigration Aware Aging Prediction in Incremental Design of Large Scale On-Chip Power Grid Network


Abstract "With the advancement of technology nodes, Electromigration (EM) signoff has become increasingly difficult, which requires a considerable amount of time for an incremental change in the power grid (PG) network design in a chip. The traditional Black’s empirical equation and Blech’s criterion are still used for EM assessment, which is a time-consuming process. In this article, for ... » read more

PowerPlanningDL: Reliability-Aware Framework for On-Chip Power Grid Design using Deep Learning


Academic research paper from Dept. of CSE, IIT Guwahatim, India. Abstract: "With the increase in the complexity of chip designs, VLSI physical design has become a time-consuming task, which is an iterative design process. Power planning is that part of the floorplanning in VLSI physical design where power grid networks are designed in order to provide adequate power to all the underlying ... » read more

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