category: Special Reports

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

New Transistor Structures At 3nm/2nm
By Mark LaPedus - 25 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 12

Several foundries continue to develop new processes based on next-generation gate-all-around transistors, including more advanced high-mobility versions, but bringing these technologies into production is going to be difficult and expensive. Intel, Samsung, TSMC and others are laying the groundwork for the transition from today’s finFET transistors to new gate-all-around field-effect trans... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems
By Ed Sperling - 20 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 1

Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling
By Brian Bailey - 18 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 5

In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Managing Device Certificates Is Becoming Harder
By Bryon Moyer - 07 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

As the number of devices connected to the Internet balloons, certificate management is becoming more complex, more essential, and significantly harder to keep track of. There are many different certificates for many different purposes, not to mention certificates that are unique to each device. And the lifetimes of those certificates may vary, making it even tougher to keep operating certifi... » read more

Variation Threat In Advanced Nodes, Packages Grows
By Ed Sperling - 21 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Variation is becoming a much bigger and more complex problem for chipmakers as they push to the next process nodes or into increasingly dense advanced packages, raising concerns about the functionality and reliability of individual devices, and even entire systems. In the past, almost all concerns about variation focused on the manufacturing process. What printed on a piece of silicon didn't... » read more

3D NAND’s Vertical Scaling Race
By Mark LaPedus - 17 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 1

3D NAND suppliers are accelerating their efforts to move to the next technology nodes in a race against growing competition, but all of these vendors are facing an assortment of new business, manufacturing, and cost challenges. Two suppliers, Micron and SK Hynix, recently leapfrogged the competition and have taken the scaling race lead in 3D NAND. But Samsung and the Kioxia-Western Digital (... » read more

Forward And Backward Compatibility In IC Designs
By Ann Mutschler - 30 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Future-proofing of designs is becoming more difficult due to the accelerating pace of innovation in architectures, end markets, and technologies such as AI and machine learning. Traditional approaches for maintaining market share and analyzing what should be in the next rev of a product are falling by the wayside. They are being replaced by best-guesses about market trends and a need to bala... » read more

Emerging Apps And Challenges For Packaging
By Mark LaPedus - 23 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Advanced packaging is playing a bigger role and becoming a more viable option to develop new system-level chip designs, but it also presents chipmakers with a confusing array of options and sometimes a hefty price tag. Automotive, servers, smartphones and other systems have embraced advanced packaging in one form or another. For other applications, it's overkill, and a simpler commodity pack... » read more

The Next Big Leap: Energy Optimization
By Brian Bailey - 16 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 1

The relationship between power and energy is technically simple, but its implication on the EDA flow is enormous. There are no tools or flows today that allow you to analyze, implement, and optimize a design for energy consumption, and getting to that point will require a paradigm shift within the semiconductor industry. The industry talks a lot about power, and power may have become a more ... » read more

A Renaissance For Semiconductors
By Brian Bailey - 29 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 2

Major shifts in semiconductors and end markets are driving what some are calling a renaissance in technology, but navigating this new, multi-faceted set of requirements may cause some structural changes for the chip industry as it becomes more difficult for a single company to do everything. For the past decade, the mobile phone industry has been the dominant driver for the semiconductor eco... » read more

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