Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Applied Materials sued its Chinese-owned rival, Mattson, over an alleged 14-month effort to steal valuable trade secrets, reports Bloomberg. In court filing, Applied Materials claimed that Mattson engaged in a spree of employee-poaching and covertly transferring semiconductor equipment designs. Global semiconductor materials revenue grew 8.9% to $72.7 billion in 2022, surpassing the previous... » read more

Server Design With Pin-Efficient CXL Interface (Georgia Tech)


A new technical paper titled "A Case for CXL-Centric Server Processors" was written by researchers at Georgia Tech. Abstract: "The memory system is a major performance determinant for server processors. Ever-growing core counts and datasets demand higher bandwidth and capacity as well as lower latency from the memory system. To keep up with growing demands, DDR--the dominant processor inter... » read more

How The Doubling Of Interconnect Bandwidth With PCI Express 6.0 Impacts IP Electrical Validation


As a result of the innovations taking place in CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and switches, the interface in hyperscale datacenters now requires faster data transfers both between compute and memory and onto the network. PCI Express (PCIe) provides the backbone for these interconnects and is used to build protocols such as Computer Express Link (CXL) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe... » read more

100G Ethernet At The Edge


The amount of data is growing, and so is the need to process it closer to the source. The edge is a middle ground between the cloud and the end point, close enough to where data is generated to reduce the time it takes to process that data, yet still powerful enough to analyze that data quickly and send it wherever it is needed. But to make this all work requires faster conduits for that data i... » read more

Unblocking The Full Potential Of PCIe Gen6 With Shared Flow Control


As technology advances at a rapid pace, PCI Express (or PCIe) has grown tremendously, allowing data transfer up to 64 GT/s in Gen6. This technology is widely used in data centers, artificial intelligence and machine learning computing, high-performance computing accelerators, and high-speed applications—including high-end SSDs, automotive, IoT, and mil-aero. To fully utilize this high-spee... » read more

PCIe 6.0 Electrical Testing For High Data-Bandwidth Applications


For nearly three decades, PCI Express (PCIe) technology has been the standard interconnect inside computers providing high bandwidth and low latency to meet customer demand. However, as the industry needs to evolve, so does the standard, keeping pace and driving future innovation. PCIe 6.0 is ubiquitous and offers power-efficient performance and high bandwidth for latency-sensitive applicati... » read more

Chiplets Taking Root As Silicon-Proven Hard IP


Chiplets are all the rage today, and for good reason. With the various ways to design a semiconductor-based system today, IP reuse via chiplets appears to be an effective and feasible solution, and a potentially low-cost alternative to shrinking everything to the latest process node. To enable faster time to market, common IP or technology that already has been silicon-proven can be utilized... » read more

PCIe 6.0 Takes Data Center Performance To The Next Level


Looking back at 2022, we saw a major update to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification. PCIe 6.0 brought with it some of the most fundamental changes yet seen by the specification, resulting in some exciting capabilities that are set to take data center performance to the next level in the years ahead. PCIe has been the interconnect of choice in computing for two decades now. Its ongoing advanc... » 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

HBM3 In The Data Center


Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus, talks about the forthcoming HBM3 standard, why this is so essential for AI chips and where the bottlenecks are today, what kinds of challenges are involved in working with this memory, and what impact chiplets and near-memory compute will have on HBM and bandwidth.     » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →