Managing Voltage Variation

By Barry Pangrle - 07 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Engineers make many tradeoffs when designing SoC’s to better meet design specifications. Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are the primary goals and all three impact the cost of the implementation. For example, higher power and performance can both require more expensive packaging for power and signal integrity as well as cooling. The larger the die area the fewer die per wafer which drives u... » read more

Supercomputing Efficiency Lags Performance Gains

By Barry Pangrle - 30 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

In last month’s article, Top 500: Frontier is Still on Top, I wrote about the latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists. Power is an incredibly important aspect of designing a world performance leading supercomputer. (Why, I can remember back to when you could run the world’s fastest machine on only a couple MW of power.) The first Green500 list was published back in 2013. Happy 1... » read more

Mitigating Voltage Droop

By Aakash Jani - 13 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

Voltage droop, also known as IR drop, is a phenomenon that occurs when the current in the power delivery network abruptly changes due to workload fluctuations. This can lead to supply voltage drops across system-on-chips (SoCs) which can cause severe performance degradation, limit their energy efficiency, and in extreme cases can cause catastrophic timing failures. To avoid these issues, conven... » read more

Top500: Frontier Is Still On Top

By Barry Pangrle - 25 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

The latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists were just released on May 22, 2023. The last time that I wrote about the Green500, a Chinese machine, NRCPC’s Sunway TaihuLight, was sitting at the top of the Top500 list. It’s been a while since I last wrote about these lists and it’s interesting to look back at the leap in performance and energy efficiency over the past 7 years. ... » read more

TSMC Targets N2 Production For 2025

By Barry Pangrle - 02 May, 2023 - Comments: 0

April ended with TSMC’s financial results for the 1st Quarter of 2023 reported on April 20, 2023, and their North American Technology Symposium was held on April 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TSMC’s N3 entered volume production in 4Q 2022 and TSMC’s N2 “nanosheet” technology is on schedule for production in 2025. TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, said during the 1Q conference cal... » read more

Squeezing The Margins

By Barry Pangrle - 29 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Back in 2016, we looked at the MediaTek Helio X20, the first Tri-Gear mobile SoC. Tri-Gear is a step beyond ARM’s big.LITTLE concept of using two different cores that have unique power and performance characteristics, by adding a third core. The main advantage to this approach is having more core choices to best run workloads at better energy efficiency and performance operating points. At... » read more

Cutting Clock Costs On The Bleeding Edge Of Process Nodes

By Aakash Jani - 01 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

In a recent study done by McKinsey and IDC, we see that physical design and verification costs are increasing exponentially with shrinking transistor sizes. As figure 1 shows, physical design (PD) and pre-silicon verification costs are doubling each process leap. As companies leap from node to leading node, a natural question arises. Why is it becoming harder and more expensive to tapeout a chi... » read more

Adaptive Clocking: Minding Your P-States And C-States

By Aakash Jani - 23 Jun, 2022 - Comments: 0

Larger processor arrays are here to stay for AI and cloud applications. For example, Ampere offers a 128-core behemoth for hyperscalers (mainly Oracle), while Esperanto integrates almost 10x more cores for AI workloads. However, power management becomes increasingly important with these arrays, and system designers need to balance dynamic power with system latency. As we march year over year, t... » read more

Enabling Big Chip AI Solutions Through Intelligent Clock Networks

By Aakash Jani - 26 May, 2022 - Comments: 0

Data centers, autonomous vehicles, and computer vision applications are pushing the limits of scalable AI compute. Data center chips face multi-trillion parameter models that continue growing every year. ADAS systems require flexibility and processing power for new model types, such as vision transformers. Edge AI solutions demand tight power budgets and the ability to process multiple models i... » read more

Low Earth Orbit Satellites For More Reliable Internet

By Aakash Jani - 28 Apr, 2022 - Comments: 0

Working from home may have reduced the stress of commuting, but it put a heavy strain on the power grid and ate into energy reserves. Still, with utilities such as electricity and water, it's possible to buy or borrow from adjacent grids or territories. The same cannot be said for internet service providers. They cannot just borrow from another service provider. Instead, their customers woul... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.