category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Startup Funding: November 2022
By Jesse Allen - 07 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

November was a month for mega-rounds, with ten companies receiving investments of at least $100 million. One of those is a startup providing connectivity solutions for data centers and enabling use of the memory pooling functionality in the latest update to the CXL standard. Two quantum computer startups were part of the $100M+ club this month — one using very cold atoms to take on not only q... » read more

On-Chip Power Distribution Modeling Becomes Essential Below 7nm
By Ann Mutschler - 16 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

Modeling power distribution in SoCs is becoming increasingly important at each new node and in 3D-ICs, where tolerances involving power are much tighter and any mistake can cause functional failures. At mature nodes, where there is more metal, power problems continue to be rare. But at advanced nodes, where chips are running at higher frequencies and still consuming the same or greater power... » read more

Taking Power Much More Seriously
By Brian Bailey - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

An increasing number of electronic systems are becoming limited by thermal issues, and the only way to solve them is by elevating energy consumption to a primary design concern rather than a last-minute optimization technique. The optimization of any system involves a complex balance of static and dynamic techniques. The goal is to achieve maximum functionality and performance in the smalles... » read more

Solving Thermal Coupling Issues In Complex Chips
By Ann Mutschler - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

Rising chip and packaging complexity is causing a proportionate increase in thermal couplings, which can reduce performance, shorten the lifespan of chips, and impact overall reliability of chips and systems. Thermal coupling is essentially a junction between two devices, such as a chip and a package, or a transistor and a substrate, in which heat is transferred from one to the other. If not... » read more

Balancing Power And Heat In Advanced Chip Designs
By Karen Heyman - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Power and heat use to be someone else's problem. That's no longer the case, and the issues are spreading as more designs migrate to more advanced process nodes and different types of advanced packaging. There are a number of reasons for this shift. To begin with, there are shrinking wire diameters, thinner dielectrics, and thinner substrates. The scaling of wires requires more energy to driv... » read more

Startup Funding: October 2022
By Jesse Allen - 02 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Investors poured $3.5 billion into 113 startup companies in October 2022, especially new battery technology, AI hardware, and faster memory access. Battery technology dominated the fundraising in October thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy and four funding rounds that exceeded $200M. The DOE awarded sizeable grants to help 20 companies, including six startups, build out battery material ... » read more

Complex Tradeoffs In Inferencing Chips
By John Koon - 17 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

Designing AI/ML inferencing chips is emerging as a huge challenge due to the variety of applications and the highly specific power and performance needs for each of them. Put simply, one size does not fit all, and not all applications can afford a custom design. For example, in retail store tracking, it's acceptable to have a 5% or 10% margin of error for customers passing by a certain aisle... » read more

Foundational Changes In Chip Architectures
By Brian Bailey - 13 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 5

We take many things in the semiconductor world for granted, but what if some of the decisions made decades ago are no longer viable or optimal? We saw a small example with finFETs, where the planar transistor would no longer scale. Today we are facing several bigger disruptions that will have much larger ripple effects. Technology often progresses in a linear fashion. Each step provides incr... » read more

Designing A Better Clock Network
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

Laying the proper clock network architecture foundation makes all the difference for the best performance, power, and timing of a chip, particularly in advanced node SoCs packed with billions of transistors. Each transistor, which acts like a standard cell, needs a clock. An efficient clock network should ensure the switching transistors save power. In today’s advanced nodes, when a design... » read more

Dealing With Heat In Near-Memory Compute Architectures
By Karen Heyman - 13 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

The explosion in data forcing chipmakers to get much more granular about where logic and memory are placed on a die, how data is partitioned and prioritized to utilize those resources, and what the thermal impact will be if they are moved closer together on a die or in a package. For more than a decade, the industry has faced a basic problem — moving data can be more resource-intensive tha... » read more

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