3D-IC For The Masses

By Brian Bailey - 13 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

The concepts of 3D-IC and chiplets have the whole industry excited. It potentially marks the next stage in the evolution of the IP industry, but so far, technical difficulties and cost have curtailed its usage to just a handful of companies. Even within those, they do not appear to be seeing benefits from heterogeneous integration or reuse. Attempts to make this happen are not new. "A decade... » read more

Chiplets Add New Power Issues

By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

Delivering and managing power are becoming key challenges in the rollout of chiplets, adding significantly to design complexity and forcing chipmakers to weigh tradeoffs that can have a big impact on the performance, reliability, and the overall cost of semiconductors. Power is a concern for every chip and chiplet design, even if the specifics differ based on the application. Systems vendors... » read more

Integrating Data From Design, Manufacturing, And The Field

By Adam Kovac - 13 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

Chip design is starting to include more options to ensure chips behave reliably in the field, boosting the ability to tweak both hardware and software as chips age. The basic problem is that as dimensions become smaller, and as more features are added into devices — especially with heterogeneous assemblies of chiplets running some type of AI — the potential for thermally induced structur... » read more

What Scares Chip Engineers About Generative AI

By Adam Kovac - 26 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 0

Experts At The Table: LLMs and other generative AI programs are a long way away from being able to design entire chips on their own from scratch, but the emergence of the tech has still raised some genuine concerns. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, which included Rod Metcalfe, product management group director at Cadence; Syrus Ziai, vice-president of engineering at E... » read more

Signal Integrity Plays Increasingly Critical Role In Chiplet Design

By Ann Mutschler - 13 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 1

Maintaining the quality and reliability of electrical signals as they travel through interconnects is proving to be much more challenging with chiplets and advanced packaging than in monolithic SoCs and PCBs. Signal integrity is a fundamental requirement for all chips and systems, but it becomes more difficult with chiplets due to reflections, loss, crosstalk, process variation, and various ... » read more

Normalization Keeps AI Numbers In Check

By Bryon Moyer - 13 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 0

AI training and inference are all about running data through models — typically to make some kind of decision. But the paths that the calculations take aren’t always straightforward, and as a model processes its inputs, those calculations may go astray. Normalization is a process that can keep data in bounds, improving both training and inference. Foregoing normalization can result in at... » read more

What Exactly Is Multi-Physics?

By Brian Bailey - 13 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 1

Multi-physics is the new buzzword in semiconductor design and analysis, but the fuzziness of the term is a reflection of just how many new and existing problems need to be addressed simultaneously in the design flow with advanced nodes and packaging. This disaggregation of planar SoCs and the inclusion of more processing elements, memories, interconnects, and passives inside a package has cr... » read more

Power Budgets Optimized By Managing Glitch Power

By Adam Kovac - 16 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

“Waste not, want not,” says the old adage, and in general, that’s good advice to live by. But in the realm of chip design, wasting power is a fact of physics. Glitch power – power that gets expended due to delays in gates and/or wires – can account for up to 40% of the power budget in advanced applications like data center servers. Even in less high-powered circuits, such as those fou... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities

By Brian Bailey - 16 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

What’s The Best Way To Sell An Inference Engine?

By Bryon Moyer - 16 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

The burgeoning AI market has seen innumerable startups funded on the strength of their ideas about building faster, lower-power, and/or lower-cost AI inference engines. Part of the go-to-market dynamic has involved deciding whether to offer a chip or IP — with some newcomers pivoting between chip and IP implementations of their ideas. The fact that some companies choose to sell chips while... » read more

← Older posts

category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive