Blog Review: June 24


Cadence's Paul McLellan provides an overview of the new IEEE 1838 standard for manufacturing test of 3D stacked ICs and how it aims to enable testing of multi-die chiplet-based designs. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls investigates the scope and lifetime of pointers in embedded applications. A Synopsys writer checks out the latest mobile memory standard, JESD209-5A, and the enhancements i... » read more

Eliminate Silicon Respins With Netlist CDC Verification


Clock domain crossing (CDC) verification has been an integral part of modern chip design flow for quite sometime. Traditionally CDC verification has been done during the RTL stage. However, for advanced designs and complex flows, there is significant logic optimization during RTL synthesis as well as backend flows at the netlist stage. This mandates clock domain crossing verification a must for... » read more

Using ML In Manufacturing


How to prevent early life failures by applying machine learning to different use cases, and how to interpret models for different tradeoffs on reliability. Jeff David, vice president of AI solutions at PDF Solutions, digs down into how to utilize data to improve reliability. » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 23


Fan-out gas sensors At the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Indian Institute of Science presented a paper on the development of a wearable MEMS gas sensor device based on a flexible wafer-level fan-out packaging technology. Researchers have demonstrated a gas sensor device or a personal environment... » read more

What’s After PAM-4?


[This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Part 1 can be found here.] The future of high-speed physical signaling is uncertain. While PAM-4 remains one of the key standards today, there is widespread debate about whether PAM-8 will succeed it. This has an impact on everything from where the next bottlenecks are likely to emerge and the best approaches to solving them, to how chips, systems and p... » read more

Challenges In Building Smarter Systems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to define what the edge will look like with Jeff DeAngelis, managing director of the Industrial and Healthcare Business Unit at Maxim Integrated; Norman Chang, chief technologist at Ansys; Andrew Grant, senior director of artificial intelligence at Imagination Technologies; Thomas Ensergueix, senior director of the automotive and IoT line of business at Arm; V... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: June 23


Capturing waste heat Researchers at Wuhan University and University of California Los Angeles developed a hydrogel that can both cool down electronics and convert the waste heat into electricity. The thermogalvanic hydrogel consists of a polyacrylamide framework infused with water and specific ions. When they heated the hydrogel, two of the ions (ferricyanide and ferrocyanide) transferred e... » read more

China Speeds Up Advanced Chip Development


China is accelerating its efforts to advance its domestic semiconductor industry, amid ongoing trade tensions with the West, in hopes of becoming more self-sufficient. The country is still behind in IC technology and is nowhere close to being self-reliant, but it is making noticeable progress. Until recently, China’s domestic chipmakers were stuck with mature foundry processes with no pres... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs At next week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple is expected to roll out its long-awaited Arm-based Mac computers. This could provide a boost for Apple’s foundry vendor as well as equipment makers. It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry. As reported by the Apple sites, Apple is moving from Intel’s microprocessors to its own Arm-based chips for th... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Rambus debuted 112G XSR/USR PHY IP on TSMC's N7 7nm process. The PHY IP enables die-to-die and die-to-optical engine connectivity for chiplets and co-packaged optics targeting data center, networking, 5G, HPC, and AI/ML applications. It has been demonstrated in silicon to exceed the reach/BER performance of the CEI-112G XSR specification and supports NRZ and PAM-4 signaling at v... » read more

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