Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


This week saw more fallout from U.S. export controls: SK hynix may consider selling its memory chip production facilities in China if recently imposed controls make it too difficult to continue operations there, according to Nikkei Asia. "As a contingency plan, we are considering selling the fab, selling the equipment or transferring the equipment to South Korea," said Kevin Noh, SK hynix ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools and IP Scandinavian researchers used a laser-powered chip to transmit about 1.84 petabytes of data over a fiber optic cable in one second. The scientists said the technology could lead to faster broadband speeds and reduce the amount of energy used to keep the internet running. Imec said the semiconductor industry is likely to see increasing separation of power delivery and signal rou... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Ford Motor Company revealed it lost $827 million in the third quarter because of parts shortages and unexpected supplier costs. Those shortages affected 40,000 to 50,000 vehicles. The company is shutting down its interest in its self-driving car unit Argo.ai, which it shared with Volkswagen since 2019. Ford will instead focus on advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS), which... » read more

What’s So Different About Interposer Signal Integrity?


By Kelly Damalou and Pete Gasperini To achieve gains in power, performance, area, and cost, 3D-IC architectures are pushing electronics design to new limits. Silicon integration technology and associated devices have undergone an impressive evolution over the last several decades. Their development encourages technological advancement in applications like high-performance computing, Artificial... » read more

A Power-First Approach


It is becoming evidently clear that heat will be the limiter for the future of semiconductors. Already, large percentages of a chip are dark at any time, because if everything operated at the same time the amount of heat generated would exceed the ability of the chip and package to dissipate that energy. If we now start to contemplate stacking dies, where the ability to extract heat remains con... » read more

Raising IP Integration Up A Level


An increase in the number and complexity of IP blocks, coupled with changing architectures and design concerns, are driving up the need for new tools that can enable, automate, and optimize integration in advanced chips and packages. Power, security, verification and a host of other issues are cross-cutting concerns, and they make pure hierarchical approaches difficult. Adding to future comp... » read more

Fabless IDMs Redefine The Leading Edge


Large systems companies are looking more like integrated device manufacturers, designing their own advanced chips, packages, and systems for internal use. But because these are not pure-play chip companies, they are disrupting a 10-year cadence of customization and standardization that has defined the chip industry from its inception, and extending the period of innovation without the associate... » read more

Bug-Free Designs


It is possible in theory to create a design with no bugs, but it's impractical, unnecessary, and extremely difficult to prove for bugs you care about. The problem is intractable because the potential state space is enormous for any practical design. The industry has devised ways to handle this complexity, but each has limitations, makes assumptions, and employs techniques that abstract the p... » read more

Considering The Power Of The Cloud For EDA


By Michael White, Siemens EDA, in technical collaboration with Peeyush Tugnawat, Google Cloud, and Philip Steinke, AMD At DAC 2022, Google Cloud, AMD, and Calibre Design Solutions presented an EDA in the cloud solution that enables companies to access virtually unlimited compute resources when and as needed to optimize their design and verification flows. If your company is considering addin... » read more

Enabling The Highest Levels Of SoC Security


The tremendous data and bandwidth growth in the era of supercomputing is driving technological advances across markets and is reshaping system-on-chip (SoC) designs supporting new compute architectures, more acceleration, and more storage. As high bandwidth interfaces including DDR, PCIe, CXL, Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort are proliferating and evolving from one generation to another, so does ... » read more

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