Die-to-Die Interconnects for Chip Disaggregation


Today, data growth is at an unprecedented pace. We’re now looking at petabytes of data moving into zettabytes. What that translates to is the need for considerably more compute power and much more bandwidth to process all that data. In networking, high-speed SerDes PHYs represent the linchpin for blazing fast back and forth transmission of data in data centers. In turn, demand is increa... » read more

Die-To-Die Interconnects For Chip Disaggregation


Today, data growth is at an unprecedented pace. We’re now looking at petabytes of data moving into zettabytes. What that translates to is the need for considerably more compute power and much more bandwidth to process all that data. In networking, high-speed SerDes PHYs represent the linchpin for blazing fast back and forth transmission of data in data centers. In turn, demand is increasin... » read more

Aging Analysis Hits Mainstream


Given the ever increasing challenge of designing high-reliability ICs – especially for automotive, medical, industrial, and aerospace and defense applications – the inclusion of aging analysis capabilities is on the rise in EDA tools as well as design IP. The issue comes down to predictability of devices as they operate. As discussed in, “Taming NBTI To Improve Device Reliability,” t... » read more

The Process Design Kit: Protecting Design Know-How


Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each company. In these days, when designs contained hundreds of transistors, companies modeled each feature in an IC at a first principles level, meaning each transistor or fundamental device was analyzed an... » read more

Interaction Of Hard IP And Chip-Package


Current and future customer-specific circuit development requires an increasing number of different interfaces, such as for memory (DDR3, DDR4, LPDDR3, LPDDR4, etc.), radio interfaces (Bluetooth, NBIoT, etc.) or high-speed LVDS/SERDES interfaces (DisplayPort, Ethernet, USB, etc.). For customer-specific circuit projects, these components are frequently purchased as hard IP because the developmen... » read more

Next-Generation Ethernet Interconnects For 400G Hyperscale Data Centers


The need for higher bandwidth with efficient connectivity increases as hyperscale data centers transition to faster, flatter, and more scalable network architectures, such as the 2-tier leaf-spine, as seen in Figure 1. The leaf-spine architecture requires massive interconnects as each leaf switch fans-out to every spine switch, maximizing connectivity between servers. Hardware accelerators, art... » read more

Psst, Says 5G… Wanna See What My New Antenna Tech Challenge Looks Like?


5G offers incredible potential, enabling 1000X more traffic, 10X faster speeds and an increase in the device battery capacity by 10X! So why hasn’t 5G technology been rolled out yet? The benefits all sound great, but there are also some challenges that need to be addressed. 5G is destined to cause a revolution around the world with burgeoning industries like autonomous driving, internet of... » read more

ML Becomes Useful For Variation Coverage


According to industry sources, it is quite a feat to get a chip back from the foundry that actually meets the specifications the design team worked towards, and because of this much effort is underway across the industry to understand what will happen to a design once it reaches the manufacturing stage, and what the effects of design choices actually are. AI and ML are absolutely the buzz wo... » read more

Re-using Common Simulation Set-Up Processes To Speed Regression


Functional verification of SoCs always has some kind of set up process. For complex SoCs, at least, this initial set up phase often consumes from 20 to 90% of each test’s total simulation time. And thousands of tests are run in the verification of a design. This set up phase could be either executing the exact same sequence of simulation steps, or programming the design to reach the same i... » read more

Overcoming Low Power Verification Challenges For Mixed-Signal SoC Designs


With increasing SoC complexity and advanced power-aware architectures, a robust low power verification methodology is important for signing off the design at different stages from RTL through netlist. For mixed-signal SoCs, the challenge is, there is no well-defined low power methodology, nor are the industry’s low power verification tools equipped to handle custom designs. This article propo... » read more

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