The Importance Of Aging Simulation In IC Design


Electronics reliability has been an important quality criterion in the automotive sector and in industrial automation for years. Electronics in this sector have to achieve product lifetimes of 10+ years under partially harsh environmental conditions. But the reliability of electronics is also becoming more important in other fields. For example, end customers now keep consumer products longer, ... » read more

Reliable And Efficient Compact Models For Scalable MTJ Simulation


By Fernando García Redondo, Pranay Prabhat, and Mudit Bhargava Since its discovery in 1975, Tunnel-Magneto-Resistance (TMR) has been actively investigated. From the 2000s, advances in process technologies have made the miniaturization of Magnetic Random Access Memories (MRAMs) based on TMR devices possible, together with integration into traditional CMOS processes. Introducing magneti... » read more

Wrestling With Analog At 3nm


Analog engineers are facing big challenges at 3nm, forcing them to come up with creative solutions to a widening set of issues at each new process node. Still, these problems must be addressed, because no digital chip will work without at least some analog circuitry. As fabrication technologies shrink, digital logic improves in some combination of power, performance, and area. The process te... » read more

Integrated Ethernet PCS And PHY IP For 400G/800G Hyperscale Data Centers


Ethernet has become the primary network protocol of choice for the required server-to-server communication in hyperscale data centers, as it allows hyperscalers to disaggregate network switches and install their software operating systems independently. Ethernet enables cost-effective, dense, open switches and networking technologies which reduce cost/power per bit with transistor scaling. Ethe... » read more

The Shortest Path Deception


When manufacturing, assembling, and using integrated circuit (IC) chips, the electrostatic discharge (ESD) caused by accumulated static can damage the IC circuitry if the circuit is not properly protected [1]. To prevent such damage, ESD protection devices are designed into the circuitry such that they will create a low impedance path that limits the peak voltage and current by diverting excess... » read more

Tradeoffs Between Edge Vs. Cloud


Increasing amounts of processing are being done on the edge, but how the balance will change between what's computed in the cloud versus the edge remains unclear. The answer may depend as much on the value of data and other commercial reasons as on technical limitations. The pendulum has been swinging between doing all processing in the cloud to doing increasing amounts of processing at the ... » read more

The Next Generation Of General-Purpose Compute At Hot Chips


At the recent HOT CHIPS, the first day opened with the chips that you first think of when you hear the word processor. These are the next generation of chips from the likes of Intel, AMD, and IBM. There were lots of other chips too, such as Arm's Neoverse N2, and NVIDIA's new data-processing unit (DPU), or AMD's next-generation graphics architecture. But for this post, anyway, I'm going to focu... » read more

On the Road To Higher Memory Bandwidth


In the decade since HBM was first announced, we’ve seen two-and-a-half generations of the standard come to market. HBM’s “wide and slow” architecture debuted first at a data rate of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) running over a 1024-bit wide interface. The product of that data rate and that interface width provided a bandwidth of 128 gigabytes per second (GB/s). In 2016, HBM2 doubled the s... » read more

Will Monolithic 3D DRAM Happen?


As DRAM scaling slows, the industry will need to look for other ways to keep pushing for more and cheaper bits of memory. The most common way of escaping the limits of planar scaling is to add the third dimension to the architecture. There are two ways to accomplish that. One is in a package, which is already happening. The second is to sale the die into the Z axis, which which has been a to... » read more

The Impact Of Multiphysics On Production Electronic Design


For many electronic design professionals, it has become clear that the industry is transitioning through an inflection point that is shifting some of the ground rules of design. The increase in the speed and integration density in today’s systems are blurring the lines between chip design and traditional board or system design. This finds its fullest expression in multi-die, 3D integrated ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →