Advanced Packaging: A Curse Or A Blessing For Trustworthiness?


In recent years, the issue of trustworthiness in electronics has become increasingly important, especially in areas where security is of the essence such as the automotive sector, industry, and critical infrastructure. These sectors depend on electronic systems that are not only powerful but also absolutely reliable and, above all, secure. This represents a major challenge, as the increasing co... » read more

How Ultra Ethernet And UALink Enable High-Performance, Scalable AI Networks


By Ron Lowman and Jon Ames AI workloads are significantly driving innovation in the interface IP market. The exponential increase in AI model parameters, doubling approximately every 4-6 months, stands in stark contrast to the slower pace of hardware advancements dictated by Moore's Law, which follows an 18-month cycle. This discrepancy demands hardware innovations to support AI workloads, c... » read more

Choosing The Right Memory Solution For AI Accelerators


To meet the increasing demands of AI workloads, memory solutions must deliver ever-increasing performance in bandwidth, capacity, and efficiency. From the training of massive large language models (LLMs) to efficient inference on endpoint devices, choosing the right memory technology is critical for chip designers. This blog explores three leading memory solutions—HBM, LPDDR, and GDDR—and t... » read more

MACs Are Not Enough: Why “Offload” Fails


For the past half-decade, countless chip designers have approached the challenges of on-device machine learning inference with the simple idea of building a “MAC accelerator” – an array of high-performance multiply-accumulate circuits – paired with a legacy programmable core to tackle the ML inference compute problem. There are literally dozens of lookalike architectures in the market t... » read more

The When, Why, And How Of Waiting And Backoff In Multi-Threaded Applications On Arm


With multithreaded applications, there are situations where it is unavoidable or desirable to wait for other threads. Implementing such wait instruction sequences correctly is important for both multithreaded scalability and power efficiency. Scalability is measured both in terms of aggregated throughput and fairness. Fairness is when all contending threads get an equal share of the contended ... » read more

Is Liquid Cooling The Future Of Your Data Center?


The data center industry is facing unprecedented challenges. With chip densities skyrocketing, high-performance computing is being pushed to its limits, all while energy costs are soaring and environmental concerns are escalating. Securing approvals for new data center facilities has become more complex, often plagued by community objections and grid supply issues. However, amidst these hurd... » read more

Power Budgets Optimized By Managing Glitch Power


“Waste not, want not,” says the old adage, and in general, that’s good advice to live by. But in the realm of chip design, wasting power is a fact of physics. Glitch power – power that gets expended due to delays in gates and/or wires – can account for up to 40% of the power budget in advanced applications like data center servers. Even in less high-powered circuits, such as those fou... » read more

Tame IR Drop Like Google


In the relentless pursuit of semiconductor performance and efficiency, tech giants like Google are constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible. As they scale their designs to the cutting-edge 3nm node, power integrity has emerged as a critical challenge that must be overcome. Enter Calibre DesignEnhancer (DE), Siemens' analysis-based solution for enhancing design reliability and man... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities


The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

What’s The Best Way To Sell An Inference Engine?


The burgeoning AI market has seen innumerable startups funded on the strength of their ideas about building faster, lower-power, and/or lower-cost AI inference engines. Part of the go-to-market dynamic has involved deciding whether to offer a chip or IP — with some newcomers pivoting between chip and IP implementations of their ideas. The fact that some companies choose to sell chips while... » read more

← Older posts