Driving Toward A Sustainable Future


While the automotive industry has been focused on developing innovative electric vehicle (EV) designs for years, there is a new sense of urgency today. Worldwide sales of EVs are increasing quickly1, growing by 46% in 2020 and by 160% in the first half of 2021. Consumer demand is an important factor, but equally important are government mandates. In 2021, the European Union introduced strict... » read more

Automated DRC Voltage Annotation Provides Faster And More Accurate Verification For Voltage-Aware Spacing Rules


Accurate and repeatable reliability verification is now essential for both advanced node designs and the increasingly complex products being produced at established nodes. To ensure compliance with all process, reliability, and power management requirements, voltage-aware DRC applies variable spacing requirements, based on either the absolute voltage or delta voltage values, to accurately evalu... » read more

Research Bits: April 13


Washable battery Researchers from the University of British Columbia developed a washable, flexible, and stretchable battery. “Wearable electronics are a big market and stretchable batteries are essential to their development,” said Dr. Ngoc Tan Nguyen, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s faculty of applied science. “However, up until now, stretchable batteries have not been washable. Th... » read more

Key Applications For In-Chip Monitoring IP


The latest SoCs on advanced semiconductor nodes especially FinFET, typically include a fabric of sensors spread across the die and for good reason. But why and what are the benefits? This article explores some of the key applications for In Chip monitoring and why embedding In Chip monitoring IP is an essential step to maximize performance and reliability and minimize power, or a combination of... » read more

Interop Shift Left: Using Pre-Silicon Simulation for Emerging Standards


By Martin James, Gary Dick, and Arif Khan, Cadence with Suhas Pai and Brian Rea, Intel The Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) 2.0 specification, released in 2020, accompanies the latest PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 specification to provide a path to high-bandwidth, cache-coherent, low-latency transport for many high-bandwidth applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, ... » read more

A Full-GaN Solution For High Power Density Chargers And Adapters


Due to continuous demand for high power density, USB-C fast chargers’ switching frequencies need to be increased to reduce the size of the transformers and the filter components. Emerging technologies based on Wide Band Gap (WBG) semiconductor materials enable new approaches to increase power density. At high switching frequencies, GaN HEMTs for synchronous rectifier (SR) switches have the ad... » read more

Research Bits: April 5


Creating qubits in bulk Researchers from Intel and QuTech, an institute of the Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), built a qubit using standard semiconductor manufacturing facilities. The qubit is based on the spin of single electrons that are captured in a silicon nanoscale device, which resembles conventional transistors. ... » read more

Clocks Getting Skewed Up


At a logical level, synchronous designs are very simple and the clock just happens. But the clocking network is possibly the most complex in a chip, and it's fraught with the most problems at the physical level. To some, the clock is the AC power supply of the chip. To others, it is an analog network almost beyond analysis. Ironically, there are no languages to describe clocking, few tools t... » read more

The Foundations Of Computational Electromagnetics


Maxwell’s Equations can be expressed in multiple variants – there are integral and differential versions in both frequency and time domains, along with quasi-static and full-wave forms. Their elegance is evident upon sight yet for only the simplest systems are there known solutions. Thus, without assumptions to simplify the math and/or system under study, it is frequently impossible to full... » read more

Research Bits: March 29


Brain-like AI chip Researchers from Purdue University, Santa Clara University, Portland State University, Pennsylvania State University, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Illinois Chicago, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and University of Georgia built a reprogrammable chip that could be used as the basis for brain-like AI hardware. “The brains of living beings can continuously l... » read more

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