Author's Latest Posts


A Node Too Far?


Physics is an unforgiving master. While the semiconductor industry has been actively developing new transistor structures, new materials for interconnects and lining trenches, and new approaches to alleviate congestion at the lowest metal levels, it also has been playing an accelerating game of Whac-a-Mole. Whenever a problem pops up, the solution to that problem is never complete and more prob... » read more

Using Big Data For Yield And Reliability


John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB, talks about the importance of clean data for traceability, yield improvement and device reliability, where and how it gets cleaned, and why that needs to be accompanied by domain expertise. » read more

DDR PHY Training


Brett Murdock, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, explains how to train the DRAM physical layer using firmware, why that is so important for flexibility, and what kinds of issues engineers encounter when using this approach. » read more

Scaling At The Angstrom Level


It now appears likely that 2nm will happen, and possibly the next node or two beyond that. What isn't clear is what those chips will be used for, by whom, and what they ultimately will look like. The uncertainty isn't about the technical challenges. The semiconductor industry understands the implications of every step of the manufacturing process down to the sub-nanometer level, including ho... » read more

Big Changes In Tiny Interconnects


One of the fundamental components of a semiconductor, the interconnect, is undergoing radical changes as chips scale below 7nm. Some of the most pronounced shifts are occurring at the lowest metal layers. As more and smaller transistors are packed onto a die, and as more data is processed and moved both on and off a chip or across a package, the materials used to make those interconnects, th... » read more

Thinking Way, Way Outside The Box


The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium has set records for global cooperation by giant companies, universities and various federal agencies and national laboratories. But it also may have cracked opened a door for much more than that. Until now, there has been a massive race for dominance in the data center. Big companies have gotten rich on data, building infrastructure at a col... » read more

Stream Vs. Pool Data Processing


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, looks at the very different data processing requirements at the edge and in the data center, and what really drives efficiency and speed in applications such as automotive. » read more

Redefining Device Failures


Can a 5nm or 3nm chip really perform to spec over a couple decades? The answer is yes, but not using traditional approaches for designing, manufacturing or testing those chips. At the next few process nodes, all the workarounds and solutions that have been developed since 45nm don't necessarily apply. In the early finFET processes, for example, the new transistor structure provided a huge im... » read more

Last-Level Cache


Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP, explains how to reduce latency and improve performance with last-level cache in order to avoid sending large amounts of data to external memory, and how to ensure quality of service on a chip by taking into account contention for resources. » read more

Lane Departure Warnings For The Auto Industry


The automotive chip market is undergoing a series of subtle but significant shifts behind the scenes that could have major implications for the global automotive supply chain. After a few years of racing toward autonomous vehicles and setting in motion a frenzy of activity, some of the big auto makers have begun taking the design of key functions such as centralized logic in-house. There... » read more

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