A Glimpse Into Deep Space With Extreme Optical Engineering


By Daewook Kim and Erik Ferguson In the past few decades, optical science has pushed far beyond the foundations originally laid by Galileo and Newton 400 years ago. The planned deployment of new ground- and space-based telescopes dedicated to seeing farther into deep space in more detail than ever before will provide astronomers with increased opportunities to find Earth-like exoplanets and ... » read more

Electronics And Its Role In Climate Change


Sustainability has become a “scorching topic” (pun intended) in discussions I have with customers and ecosystem partners. It is now vital to many corporations as part of what many they report on “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG). It can also be very confusing. In this post, I am trying to clarify some confusion after attending and organizing several related events recently. ... » read more

Using ML Methods In Production-Ready Engineering Solutions For IC Verification


By WeiLii Tan & Jeff Dyck Semiconductor designs continue to push the envelope of performance, functionality, and efficiency while their application scope expands in high-performance computing, automotive solutions, and IoT devices. The increased design complexity, scale, and mission-critical operations of semiconductor designs mean that IC verification strategies must evolve to cover expon... » read more

The Reliability Of Analog Integrated Circuits And Their Simulation-Aided Verification


Different challenges have to be overcome when designing integrated circuits. Besides schematic and layout design work, verification in view of the non-ideal behavior of circuits and semiconductor technologies in particular is also relevant. The designed circuits have to work at specific operating voltages and within ambient temperature ranges and be robust in terms of process fluctuations ... » read more

PCIe 6.0, NVMe, And Emerging Form Factors For Storage Applications


PCIe 6.0 implementations are expandable and hierarchical with embedded switches or switch chips, allowing one root port to interface with multiple endpoints (such as storage devices, Ethernet cards, and display drivers). While the introduction of PCIe 6.0 at 64GT/s helped to increase the bandwidth available for storage applications with minimal or no increase in latency, the lack of coherency s... » read more

Building The Metaverse, Part One: The Vision


The longer-term vision of the metaverse is a universe where a massive computer-generated virtual world – or worlds – will be deeply intertwined with the physical world. This will enable humans and things to interact, transact, and collaborate in parallel or in superposition in ways that will mesh real-world activity and simulation in various and increasing indistinguishable ways. The met... » read more

Designing Immersive AR/VR Displays


Last month, we looked at how VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) video compression codecs enable cutting-edge displays. Over the next couple of articles, we will take a closer look at some of the markets where VESA DSC (Display Stream Compression) and VDC-M (VESA Display Compression) compression offer significant benefits for designers working on display-based applications. Demand... » read more

Data Integrity For JEDEC DRAM Memories


With the DRAM fabrication advancing from 1x to 1y to 1z and further to 1a, 1b, and 1c nodes along with the DRAM device speeds going up to 8533 for LPDDR5 and 8800 for DDR5, data integrity is becoming a really important issue that the OEMs and other users have to consider as part of the system that relies on the correctness of data being stored in the DRAMs for system to work as designed. I... » read more

Thermal Cycling Failure In Electronics


Each time a device is turned off and on, its temperature changes. (Just think about how often your phone lights up all day.) Energy flowing through several layers of tightly stacked materials causes devices to heat up, then rapidly cool down. This repeated oscillation between temperatures over the lifetime of a device is called thermal cycling. Why thermal management is important Thermal cycl... » read more

Electromagnetic Simulation And 3D-IC Interposers


By Matt Commens, Juliano Mologni, and Pete Gasperini Today’s 3D integrated circuit (3D-IC) technology is the culmination of 40 years of research in universities and laboratories scattered across the globe. Beginning with dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) deployments that appeared on the market a decade ago, 3D-IC has since expanded its reach. It is now decisively beginning to achieve the... » read more

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