Author's Latest Posts


EDA Revenue Up Again


The EDA industry reached $3.963 billion in revenue in Q2, boosted by a 17.6% increase in computer-aided engineering and a 17.2% increase in IP physical design and verification, according to a just-released ESD Alliance Electronic Market Data report. The overall growth was offset by an accounting change in the IP business, which resulted in a 11.6% decline to $1.255 billion, as well as some w... » read more

Issues In Calculating Glitch Power


The amount of power consumed by redundant non-functional toggles, or glitch power, can be as high as 35% of total power consumption in a design. What can be done about that? Godwin Maben, low-power architect and scientist at Synopsys, takes a deep dive into the causes of glitch, how it is affected by new process nodes and heterogeneous integration, and the impact of different workloads, higher ... » read more

Die-To-Die Security


Security concerns are growing as more chiplets or die are added into a package. There are more possible attack points, and data is becoming increasingly valuable, which makes a successful attack much more lucrative than in the past. Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist, talks about the impact of heterogeneous integration on security, what the risks are for multi-tenant data centers, and what happens ... » read more

Application-Optimized Processors


Executing a neural network on top of an NPU requires an understanding of application requirements, such as latency and throughput, as well as the potential partitioning challenges. Sharad Chole, chief scientist and co-founder of Expedera, talks about fine-grained dependencies, why processing packets out of order can help optimize performance and power, and when to use voltage and frequency scal... » read more

Data Management Challenges In Heterogeneous Systems


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss issues in smart manufacturing of chips, including data management, chiplets, and standards, with Mujtaba Hamid, general manager for product management for secure cloud environments at Microsoft; Vijaykishan Narayanan, vice president and general manager of India engineering and operations at proteanTecs; KT Moore, vice presiden... » read more

Why Chiplets Don’t Work For All Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss use cases and challenges for commercial chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts... » read more

Challenges Of Testing Advanced Packages


The number of things that can wrong in assembly and test increases as more chips are added into a package. Testing is the usual guarantor of a reliable device, but in an advanced package there are all sorts of new issues — more contacts, different handling requirements, the necessary thermal conditions for test, and variation within the package. George Harris, vice president of global test se... » read more

Patterns And Issues In AI Chip Design


AI is becoming more than a talking point for chip and system design, taking on increasingly complex tasks that are now competitive requirements in many markets. But the inclusion of AI, along with its machine learning and deep learning subcategories, also has injected widespread confusion and uncertainty into every aspect of electronics. This is partly due to the fact that it touches so many... » read more

Customizing IC Test To Improve Yield And Reliability


Testing the performance and power of semiconductors as they come off the production line is beginning to shift left in the fab, reversing a long-standing trend of assessing chips just prior to shipping. While this may sound straightforward, it's a difficult challenge which, if successful, will have broad implications for the entire design-through-manufacturing flow. Manufacturers typically g... » read more

Sweeping Changes For Leading-Edge Chip Architectures


Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power, signaling a fundamental shift from manufacturing-driven designs to those driven by semiconductor architects. In the past, most chips contained one or two leading-edge technologies, mostly to keep pace with the expected improvements i... » read more

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