Auto Chip Aging Accelerates In Hot Climates


Automotive chips are aging significantly faster than expected in hot climates with sustained high temperatures, raising concerns about the reliability of electrified vehicles over time and whether advanced-node chips are the right choice for safety-critical applications. Many of the most advanced electronics used in vehicles today are ASIL D-compliant, expected to function up to 125° C. But... » read more

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers


The chip industry is pushing to quadruple the stack height of 3D NAND flash from 200 layers to 800 layers or more over the next few years, using the additional capacity will help to feed the unending need for more memory of all types. Those additional layers will add new reliability issues a number of incremental reliability challenges, but the NAND flash industry has been steadily increasin... » read more

Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up Chiplet Design


Chiplets are gaining widespread attention across the semiconductor industry, but for this approach to really take off commercially it will require more standards, better modeling technologies and methodologies, and a hefty amount of investment and experimentation. The case for chiplets is well understood. They can speed up time to market with consistent results, at whatever process node work... » read more

HBM Options Increase As AI Demand Soars


High-bandwidth memory (HBM) sales are spiking as the amount of data that needs to be processed quickly by state-of-the-art AI accelerators, graphic processing units, and high-performance computing applications continues to explode. HBM inventories are sold out, driven by massive efforts and investments in developing and improving large language models such as ChatGPT. HBM is the memory of ch... » read more

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg


Shift left is evolving from a buzzword into a much broader shift in design methodology and EDA tooling, and while it's still early innings there is widespread agreement that it will be transformative. The semiconductor industry has gone through many changes over the past few decades. Some are obvious, but others happen because of a convergence of multiple factors that require systemic change... » read more

Hybrid Bonding Makes Strides Toward Manufacturability


Hybrid bonding is gaining traction in advanced packaging because it offers the shortest vertical connection between dies of similar or different functionalities, as well as better thermal, electrical and reliability results. Advantages include interconnect scaling to submicron pitches, high bandwidth, enhanced power efficiency, and better scaling relative to solder ball connections. But whil... » read more

Mass Customization For AI Inference


Rising complexity in AI models and an explosion in the number and variety of networks is leaving chipmakers torn between fixed-function acceleration and more programmable accelerators, and creating some novel approaches that include some of both. By all accounts, a general-purpose approach to AI processing is not meeting the grade. General-purpose processors are exactly that. They're not des... » read more

Signals In The Noise: Tackling High-Frequency IC Test


The need for high-frequency semiconductor devices is surging, fueled by growing demand for advanced telecommunications, faster sensors, and increasingly autonomous vehicles. The advent of millimeter-wave communication in 5G and 6G is pushing manufacturers to develop chips capable of handling frequencies that were once considered out of reach. However, while these technologies promise faster ... » read more

Government Chip Funding Spreads Globally


This is the first in a series of articles tracking government chip investments. See part two for Americas-focused funding and part three for the UK and EMEA, and part four for Asia. Countries around the world are ramping up investments into their semiconductor industries as part of new or existing approaches. The increased government activity stems from growing awareness of the strategic imp... » read more

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era


The widespread adoption of chiplets in domain-specific applications is creating a partitioning challenge that is much more complex than anything chip design teams have dealt with in previous designs. Nearly all the major systems companies, packaging houses, IDMs, and foundries have focused on chiplets as the best path forward to improve performance and reduce power. Signal paths can be short... » read more

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