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

Achieving Successful Timing, Power, And Physical Signoff For Multi-Die Designs


Multi-die designs using 2.5D and 3D technologies are increasingly important for a wide range of electronics applications, including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and mobile. The multi-die architecture enables designers to mix dies from different foundries and technology nodes, including existing dies from previous projects. The resulting density and... » read more

How Engineering Simulation Drives Impact for Sustainability


For decades, engineering simulation has been the engineer’s Swiss Army knife for improving the speed and cost of developing new products as well as for bringing product performance to the next level. This report reveals that while simulation has already made a significant contribution to advancing sustainability, there is still so much potential to make an even greater impact. In the conte... » read more

How Google And Intel Use Calibre DesignEnhancer To Reduce IR Drop And Improve Reliability


In the fast-paced world of semiconductor design, achieving both Design Rule Check (DRC) clean layouts and optimal electrical performance is crucial for minimizing design iterations, reducing time-to-market and ensuring product reliability. This paper explores how the Calibre DesignEnhancer (DE) analysis-based, signoff-quality EMIR solution helps design teams meet these challenges by enhancing p... » read more

AI Won’t Replace Subject Matter Experts


Experts at The Table: The emergence of LLMs and other forms of AI has sent ripples through a number of industries, raising fears that many jobs could be on the chopping block, to be replaced by automation. Whether that’s the case in semiconductors, where machine learning has become an integral part of the design process, remains to be seen. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of e... » read more

Why Your Data Center Needs a Digital Twin


The global digital twin market is on a rapid ascent, projected to skyrocket from $11.51 billion in 2023 to $137.67 billion by 2030. Spanning industries from aerospace to healthcare, digital twins are becoming an essential tool for efficient management. But what is a digital twin? Essentially, it’s a digital replica of any real-world entity—a product, system, or process—used for simulation... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 13


High-temp electrochemical memory Researchers from the University of Michigan and Sandia National Laboratory propose a nonvolatile electrochemical memory that can store and rewrite information at temperatures over 1100°F (600°C), enabling it to continue working in environments as extreme as the surface of Venus. Instead of transporting electrons, the memory moves oxygen ions between layere... » read more

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