Can You Build A Known-Good Multi-Die System?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the challenges of designing and testing multi-die systems, including how to ensure they will work as expected, with Bill Mullen, Ansys fellow; John Ferguson, senior director of product management at Siemens EDA; Chris Mueth, senior director of new markets and strategic initiatives at Keysight; Albert Zeng, senior engineering group director at Cadenc... » read more

Photomask Changes And Challenges At Mature And Advanced Nodes


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the current state and future direction of mask-making, with Harry Levinson, principal lithographer at HJL Lithography; Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S; Ezequiel Russell, senior director of mask technology at Micron; and Christopher Progler, executive vice president and CTO at Photronics. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.... » read more

RISC-V’s Increasing Influence


The industry is increasingly talking about benefits brought by the RISC-V architecture, but is it even the right starting point? While it may not be perfect, it may provide the flexibility necessary to move forward gradually. Computer architectures and software have followed in the footsteps of processors developed 80 years ago. They aimed to solve sequential, scalar arithmetic problems usin... » read more

Multi-Die Assemblies Complicate Parasitic Extraction


The shift from planar designs to multi-die assemblies with complex interconnects is transforming what had become almost an afterthought in the design process into a first-order challenge. Parasitics include things like inductance, capacitance, and resistance, which have become more problematic at advanced nodes due to increasing logic density, thinner interconnects and insulators, and a spik... » read more

Challenges In Using Sub-7nm ICs In Automotive


The automotive industry is producing vehicles with increasing levels of real-time decision-making, enabled by thousands of ICs, sensors, and multi-chip packages, but making sure these systems work flawlessly throughout their expected lifetimes is a growing challenge. Automotive chips traditionally were developed at mature process nodes in five- to seven-year cycles, but much has changed over... » read more

High-Quality Data Needed To Better Utilize Fab Data Streams


Fab operations have wrestled with big data management issues for decades. Standards help, but only if sufficient attention to detail is taken during collection. Semiconductor wafer manufaFcturing represents one of the most complex manufacturing processes in the world. With each generation of process improvement comes more sophisticated fab equipment, new process recipes, and exponential incr... » read more

How Secure Are Analog Circuits?


The move toward multi-die assemblies and the increasing value of sensor data at the edge are beginning to focus attention and raise questions about security in analog circuits. In most SoC designs today, security is almost entirely a digital concern. Security requirements in digital circuits are well understood, particularly in large data centers and at the upper end of edge computing, which... » read more

Mobile Chip Challenges In The AI Era


Leading smart phone vendors are struggling to keep pace with the rising compute and power demands of localized generative AI, standard phone functions, and the need to move more data back and forth between handsets and the cloud. In addition to edge functions, such as facial recognition and other on-device apps, phones must accommodate a continuous stream of new communications protocols, and... » read more

Connecting AI Accelerators


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the various ways that AI accelerators are being applied today with Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development at Arm; Jason Lawley, director of product marketing for AI IP at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; Alexander Petr, senior director at Keysight; Steve Roddy, chief marketing office... » read more

Optimizing Data Movement


Demand for new and better AI models is creating an insatiable demand for more processing power and much better data throughput, but it's also creating a slew of new challenges for which there are not always good solutions. The key here is figuring out where bottlenecks might crop up in complex chips and advanced packages. This involves a clear understanding of how much bandwidth is required ... » read more

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