The Race To Glass Substrates

By Gregory Haley - 29 May, 2024 - Comments: 4

The chip industry is racing to develop glass for advanced packaging, setting the stage for one of the biggest shifts in chip materials in decades — and one that will introduce a broad new set of challenges that will take years to fully resolve. Glass has been discussed as a replacement material for silicon and organic substrates for more than a decade, primarily in multi-die packages. But ... » read more

Chip Aging Becoming Key Factor In Data Center Economics

By Ann Mutschler - 20 May, 2024 - Comments: 1

Chip aging is becoming a much bigger concern inside of data centers, where it can impact server uptime, utilization rates, and the amount of energy needed to drive signals and cool entire server racks. Aging in chips is the result of both higher logic utilization and increasing transistor density. This is problematic for data centers, in general, but especially for AI chips where digital log... » read more

Securing The World’s Data: A Looming Challenge

By Adam Kovac - 15 May, 2024 - Comments: 0

A combination of increasingly complex designs, more connected devices, and a mix of different generations of security technology are creating a whole new set of concerns about the safety of data nearly everywhere. While security experts have been warning of a growing threat in electronics for decades, there have been several recent fundamental changes that elevate the risk. Among them: ... » read more

EDA Looks Beyond Chips

By Ed Sperling - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

Large EDA companies are looking at huge new opportunities that reach well beyond semiconductors, combining large-scale multi-physics simulations with methodologies and tools that were developed for chips. Top EDA executives have been talking about expanding into adjacent markets for more than a decade, but the broader markets were largely closed to them. In fact, the only significant step in... » read more

Architecting Chips For High-Performance Computing

By Ann Mutschler - 15 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

The world’s leading hyperscaler cloud data center companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Akamai — are launching heterogeneous, multi-core architectures specifically for the cloud, and the impact is being felt in high-performance CPU development across the chip industry. It's unlikely that any these chips will ever be sold commercially. They are optimized for specific ... » read more

Digital Twins Target IC Tool And Fab Efficiency

By Laura Peters - 21 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Digital twins have emerged as the hot "new" semiconductor manufacturing technology, enabling fabs to create a virtual representation of a physical system on which to experiment and optimize what's going on inside the real fab. While digital twin technology has been in use for some time in other industries, its use has been limited in semiconductor manufacturing. What's changing is the breadt... » read more

Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Ramps Up

By Gregory Haley - 21 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Circuit scaling is starting to hit a wall as the laws of physics clash with exponential increases in the volume of data, forcing chipmakers to take a much closer look at silicon photonics as a way of moving data from where it is collected to where it is processed and stored. The laws of physics are immutable. Put simply, there are limits to how fast an electron can travel through copper. The... » read more

The Rising Price Of Power In Chips

By Ed Sperling - 14 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Power is everything when it comes to processing and storing data, and much of it isn't good. Power-related issues, particularly heat, dominate chip and system designs today, and those issues are widening and multiplying. Transistor density has reached a point where these tiny digital switches are generating more heat than can be removed through traditional means. That may sound manageable e... » read more

Backside Power Delivery Gears Up For 2nm Devices

By Laura Peters - 26 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 1

The top three foundries plan to implement backside power delivery as soon as the 2nm node, setting the stage for faster and more efficient switching in chips, reduced routing congestion, and lower noise across multiple metal layers. The benefits of using this approach are significant. By delivering power using slightly fatter, less resistive lines on the backside, rather than inefficient fro... » read more

SRAM Scaling Issues, And What Comes Next

By Karen Heyman - 15 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 0

The inability of SRAM to scale has challenged power and performance goals forcing the design ecosystem to come up with strategies that range from hardware innovations to re-thinking design layouts. At the same time, despite the age of its initial design and its current scaling limitations, SRAM has become the workhorse memory for AI. SRAM, and its slightly younger cousin DRAM, have always co... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

New AI Processors Architectures Balance Speed With Efficiency

Hot Chips 24: Large language models ratchet up pressure for sustainable computing and heterogeneous integration; data management becomes key differentiator.

by Ed Sperling

category: Special Reports

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