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

Dealing With AI/ML Uncertainty

By Karen Heyman - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

Despite their widespread popularity, large language models (LLMs) have several well-known design issues, the most notorious being hallucinations, in which an LLM tries to pass off its statistics-based concoctions as real-world facts. Hallucinations are examples of a fundamental, underlying issue with LLMs. The inner workings of LLMs, as well as other deep neural nets (DNNs), are only partly kno... » read more

Is There Any Hope For Asynchronous Design?

By Brian Bailey - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 6

In an era when power has become a fundamental design constraint, questions persist about whether asynchronous logic has a role to play. It is a design style said to have significant benefits and yet has never resulted in more than a few experiments. Synchronous design utilizes a clock, where the clock frequency is set by the longest and slowest path in the design. That includes potential var... » read more

Navigating The GPU Revolution

By Gregory Haley - 24 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of GPU acceleration on mask design and production and other process technologies, with Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S; Youping Zhang, head of ASML Brion; Yalin Xiong, senior vice president and general manager of the BBP and reticle products division at KLA; and Kostas Adam, vice president of engineering at Synopsys. What f... » read more

Predicting And Preventing Process Drift

By Gregory Haley - 22 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

Increasingly tight tolerances and rigorous demands for quality are forcing chipmakers and equipment manufacturers to ferret out minor process variances, which can create significant anomalies in device behavior and render a device non-functional. In the past, many of these variances were ignored. But for a growing number of applications, that's no longer possible. Even minor fluctuations in ... » read more

Electromigration Concerns Grow In Advanced Packages

By Laura Peters - 18 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

The incessant demand for more speed in chips requires forcing more energy through ever-smaller devices, increasing current density and threatening long-term chip reliability. While this problem is well understood, it's becoming more difficult to contain in leading-edge designs. Of particular concern is electromigration, which is becoming more troublesome in advanced packages with multiple ch... » read more

What Works Best For Chiplets

By Anne Meixner - 18 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry is preparing for the migration from proprietary chiplet-based systems to a more open chiplet ecosystem, in which chiplets fabricated by different companies of various technologies and device nodes can be integrated in a single package with acceptable yield. To make this work as expected, the chip industry will have to solve a variety of well-documented technical an... » read more

Enabling Advanced Devices With Atomic Layer Processes

By Katherine Derbyshire - 18 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 2

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) used to be considered too slow to be of practical use in semiconductor manufacturing, but it has emerged as a critical tool for both transistor and interconnect fabrication at the most advanced nodes. ALD can be speeded up somewhat, but the real shift is the rising value of precise composition and thickness control at the most advanced nodes, which makes the ext... » read more

Future-Proofing Automotive V2X

By Ann Mutschler - 17 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 1

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X) technology and the path to deployment with Shawn Carpenter, program director, 5G and space at Ansys; Lang Lin, principal product manager at Ansys; Daniel Dalpiaz, senior manager product marketing, Americas, green industrial power division at Infineon; David Fritz, vice president of virtual and hybrid... » 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

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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

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

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

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

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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