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

Working With Chiplets


The usual method of migrating to the next process node to cram more features onto a piece of silicon no longer works. It's too expensive, and too limited for most applications. The path forward is now heterogeneous chiplets targeted at specific markets, and while logic will continue to scale, other features are being separated out into chiplets developed using different process technologies. Th... » read more

Data Routing In Heterogeneous Chip Designs


Ensuring data gets to where it's supposed to go at exactly the right time is a growing challenge for design engineers and architects developing heterogeneous systems. There is more data moving around these chips with dozens of targets, which makes routing signals much more complicated. Ronen Perets, senior product marketing manager at Cadence Design Systems, talks about some of the new problems... » read more

Corner-Case Bug Hunting for RISC-V


By Ashish Darbari and Ia Tsomaia RISC-V continues to make headlines worldwide, but verification continues to be challenging. The findings of the Wilson Research Report, 2022 (see figure 1) make the trends in verification clear. We presented these in a keynote talk titled, "Future is Formal," at the recent DVCon India event. One thing is quite apparent: whether you are using directed tests... » read more

Barriers To Chiplet Sockets


Experts At The Table: Demand for chiplets is growing, but debate continues about whether standards and general-purpose chiplets will kick-start the commercialization boom, or whether success will come through customization of those chiplets. Semiconductor Engineeering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technol... » read more

Accelerating Reset Domain Crossing Verification With Data Analytics Techniques


By Reetika and Sulabh Kumar Khare As the complexity of integrated circuit (IC) designs continues to rise, the task of verifying these designs has become increasingly challenging. The pace of this growth is staggering, with design complexity doubling roughly every 20 months. This exponential increase places immense pressure on verification processes, which must keep up to ensure that these so... » read more

PAM4: Pulse Amplitude Modulation Explained


Pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is already a widely adopted technology in high-speed digital communications. But to understand why it has become ubiquitous in serial data standards, you first must understand the market forces driving the data networking industry. In this article, I will explore PAM4 in-depth, from its benefits and potential tradeoffs to why it was an essential innovation that ... » read more

Enabling Innovative Multi-Vendor Chiplet-Based Designs


Chiplets have emerged as a critical implementation paradigm for semiconductor products, primarily because they can deliver cost benefits relative to a non-chiplet-based approach. The first, most well-proven, and obvious benefit of a chiplet-based approach is manufacturing cost. Manufacturing cost benefits are accrued either from the appropriate selection of chiplet die size, or by optimizin... » read more

Using AI To Glue Disparate IC Ecosystem Data


AI holds the potential to change how companies interact throughout the global semiconductor ecosystem, gluing together different data types and processes that can be shared between companies that in the past had little or no direct connections. Chipmakers always have used abstraction layers to see the bigger picture of how the various components of a chip go together, allowing them to pinpoi... » read more

Managing Performance in Modern SoC Designs


As industries like automotive, consumer electronics, telecommunications and artificial intelligence (AI) push for greater processing power, efficiency and scalability, system-on-chip (SoC) designs have rapidly evolved to meet these demands. With the growing complexity of modern SoCs, designers face the challenge of managing an increasing number of interconnected IP blocks while ensuring seamles... » read more

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