Top 5 Reasons Engineers Need A Smart NoC


As system-on-chip (SoC) designs grow more complex, IP interconnect engineers struggle with achieving optimal scalability, performance, and power efficiency. The increasing number of IP blocks, often ranging from 50 to more than 500, introduces significant interconnect congestion, timing closure issues, and power dissipation challenges. Additionally, many network-on-chip (NoC) design tasks are s... » read more

Multi-Die Design Complicates Data Management


The continued unbundling of SoCs into multi-die packages is increasing the complexity of those designs and the amount of design data that needs to be managed, stored, sorted, and analyzed. Simulations and test runs are generating increasing amounts of information. That raises questions about which data needs to be saved and for how long. During the design process, engineers now must wrestle ... » read more

3D Stacked Device Architecture Enabled By BEOL-Compatible Transistors (Stanford et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Omni 3D: BEOL-Compatible 3-D Logic With Omnipresent Power, Signal, and Clock" was published by researchers at Stanford University, Intel Corporation and Carnegie Mellon University. Abstract "This article presents Omni 3D—a 3-D-stacked device architecture that is naturally enabled by back-end-of-line (BEOL)-compatible transistors. Omni 3D interleaves metal lay... » read more

SW-HW Co-Design Mitigation To Strengthen ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks (MIT)


A technical paper titled "Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks" was published by researchers at MIT. Abstract "Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is one of the most prominently deployed mitigations against memory corruption attacks. ASLR randomly shuffles program virtual addresses to prevent attackers from knowing the location of program contents in memory. Microa... » read more

A Novel Approach For Hardware-Software Co-Verification


The complexity of system on chips (SoCs) continues to grow rapidly. Accordingly, new standards and methodologies are introduced to overcome these verification challenges. The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) from Accellera is one of the standard examples used to pursue such challenges. In this paper we will show a methodology to use PSS to orchestrate the process of HW/SW co-verificati... » read more

Pre-Silicon Verification Of Die-to-Die IP With Novel ESD Protection


All major foundries have adopted the programmable electrical rule checker (PERC) as the pre-silicon electrostatic discharge (ESD) signoff tool for IP and chip designs. This concept of rule checking works fine for most IP types, but for die-to-die IP, used in 3DIC designs, the PERC approach may not be appropriate. Die-to-die interface IP includes extremely large numbers of I/Os, trending towards... » read more

Boost SoC Efficiency And Speed With FlexGen Smart NoC IP Automation


Today’s high-end SoCs contain many heterogeneous processing elements to address the needs of HPC and AI applications. These include Central Processing Units (CPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Neural Processing Units (NPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and other hardware accelerators. Furthermore, IPs may contain clusters of these processor cores, and SoC subsystems may include arra... » read more

What Scares Chip Engineers About Generative AI


Experts At The Table: LLMs and other generative AI programs are a long way away from being able to design entire chips on their own from scratch, but the emergence of the tech has still raised some genuine concerns. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, which included Rod Metcalfe, product management group director at Cadence; Syrus Ziai, vice-president of engineering at E... » read more

Thermal Analysis Of 3D Stacking And BEOL Technologies With Functional Partitioning Of Many-Core RISC-V SoC


Thermal challenges in 3D-IC designs can cause a significant risk in meeting performance specifications. While the pace of Moore’s Law has slowed in recent years, system technology co-optimization (STCO) promises to mitigate technology scaling bottlenecks with system architecture tuning based on emerging technology offerings, including 3D technology. This white paper analyzes the impact of mat... » read more

Cracking The Memory Wall


Processor performance continues to improve exponentially, with more processor cores, parallel instructions, and specialized processing elements, but it is far outpacing improvements in bandwidth and memory. That gap, the so-called memory wall, has persisted throughout most of this century, but now it is becoming more pronounced. SRAM scaling is slowing at advanced nodes, which means SRAM takes ... » read more

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