category: Special Reports

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

How To Build Resilience Into Chips
By Ed Sperling and Ann Mutschler - 27 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Taming Corner Explosion In Complex Chips
By Brian Bailey - 23 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

There is a tenuous balance between the number of corners a design team must consider, the cost of analysis, and the margins they insert to deal with them, but that tradeoff is becoming a lot more difficult. If too many corners of a chip are explored, it might never see production. If not enough corners are explored, it could reduce yield. And if too much margin is added, the device may not be c... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects
By Laura Peters - 19 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 1

Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

Will Floating Point 8 Solve AI/ML Overhead?
By Karen Heyman - 12 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 2

While the media buzzes about the Turing Test-busting results of ChatGPT, engineers are focused on the hardware challenges of running large language models and other deep learning networks. High on the ML punch list is how to run models more efficiently using less power, especially in critical applications like self-driving vehicles where latency becomes a matter of life or death. AI already ... » read more

Screening For Silent Data Errors
By Anne Meixner - 10 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

Engineers are beginning to understand the causes of silent data errors (SDEs) and the data center failures they cause, both of which can be reduced by increasing test coverage and boosting inspection on critical layers. Silent data errors are so named because if engineers don’t look for them, then they don’t know they exist. Unlike other kinds of faulty behaviors, these errors also can c... » read more

Shifting Toward Software-Defined Vehicles
By John Koon - 05 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

Apple reportedly is developing a software-defined vehicle. But so are Renault, Hyundai, General Motors, and just about everyone else. Some of the benefits of SDVs include increased comfort, convenience, safety, reliability, and remote software and firmware updates. Preventive and predictive maintenance, and remote diagnostics, can be done more conveniently over the air, while vehicle behavio... » read more

How Far Will Copper Interconnects Scale?
By Laura Peters - 15 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

As leading chipmakers continue to scale finFETs — and soon nanosheet transistors — to ever-tighter pitches, the smallest metal lines eventually will become untenable using copper with its liner and barrier metals. What comes next, and when, is still to be determined. There are multiple options being explored, each with its own set of tradeoffs. Ever since IBM introduced the industry to c... » read more

IC Stresses Affect Reliability At Advanced Nodes
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 1

Thermal-induced stress is now one of the leading causes of transistor failures, and it is becoming a top focus for chipmakers as more and different kinds of chips and materials are packaged together for safety- and mission-critical applications. The causes of stress are numerous. In heterogeneous packages, it can stem from multiple components composed of different materials. “These materia... » read more

Where All The Semiconductor Investments Are Going
By Ed Sperling - 17 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 2

Companies and countries are funneling huge sums of money into semiconductor manufacturing, materials, and research — at least a half-trillion dollars over the next decade, and maybe much more — to guarantee a steady supply of chips and know-how to support growth across a wide swath of increasingly data-centric industries. The build-out of a duplicate supply chain that can guarantee capac... » read more

SiPs: The Best Things in Small Packages
By Laura Peters - 20 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

System-in-package (SiP) is quickly emerging as the package option of choice for a growing number of applications and markets, setting off a frenzy of activity around new materials, methodologies, and processes. SiP is an essential packaging platform that integrates multiple functionalities onto a single substrate, which enables lower system cost, design flexibility, and superior electrical p... » read more

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