Like Oil And Water


By Ann Steffora Mutschler For years, the promise and allure of a concurrent design methodology included talk of models, high-level synthesis, virtual prototyping and other system-level technologies all peacefully coexisting in a single design methodology. While it sounds like a good idea, the model-based design approach hasn’t mixed well with the virtual prototype approach. And at l... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Driven by fierce competition and the fact that socket decisions are made long before silicon is manufactured, semiconductor companies today ship models and virtual prototypes to their OEMs very early in hopes of locking in the socket. Admittedly, this has been happening for some time, but due to complexity and the need for flexibility of models and virtual platf... » read more

The Sky Isn’t Falling


By Ann Steffora Mutschler 3D ICs add a new dimension to design with new degrees of freedom possible, even with the added design and manufacturing complexities. Looking at the semiconductor ecosystem today and anticipating what will be needed to enable 3D ICs, it is certain that relationships will need to change. What will be required of the players and who will take responsibility for wh... » read more

Quiet, Steady And Sometimes Unexpected Advances For SOI


By Ed Sperling After years of talking about equivalent pricing, technical advantages and consistent processes, silicon on insulator finally appears to be making significant inroads—but not necessarily in ways, places, or even at process nodes where it initially was predicted to gain ground. What’s driving at least some of this change is the semiconductor industry’s progression toward ... » read more

NAND Enters Tough Cycle


By Mark LaPedus The NAND flash memory market is entering into a new and painful cycle, a period that will impact suppliers, OEMs and fab tool vendors alike. For some time, there has been an oversupply and depressed pricing in the NAND market. In mid-2011, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix and Toshiba put on the brakes in their capital spending plans. And in recent months, NAND suppliers in total h... » read more

DSA: High Stakes Game Of Alphabet Soup


By Mark LaPedus Directed self-assembly (DSA) is making progress for potential use in semiconductor production, but the industry must make some major advances in a sometimes forgotten and unsung segment—materials. DSA is a complementary patterning technology that makes use of block copolymer materials to enable fine pitches in chip designs. But today’s block copolymers based on poly (MMA... » read more

Universal Memories Fall Back To Earth


By Mark LaPedus Ten years ago, Intel Corp. declared that flash memory would stop scaling at 65nm, prompting the need for a new replacement technology. Thinking the end was near for flash, a number of companies began to develop various next-generation memory types, such as 3D chips, FeRAM, MRAM, phase-change memory (PCM), and ReRAM. Many of these technologies were originally billed as “uni... » read more

The Double Whammy


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Given that at 40nm and below every [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] has some mixed-signal content, combined with the fact that power awareness is top priority no matter what the target application is, design teams and verification engineers are grappling with tremendous challenges just to get a chip to yield. “For verification engineers and for designers, this is a ... » read more

Keeping The Balance


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The brains of datacenters today are more powerful than ever due to technology advancements in chip architectures and in manufacturing processes that allow more processing power thanks to Moore’s Law. But knowing exactly how and where to configure the processors and cores for optimum throughput and performance within a certain power budget raises a number of qu... » read more

The Limits Of Virtualization


By Ed Sperling The future of virtualization in the corporate data center is firmly established, but questions about the value of virtualization beyond that world remain as fuzzy as the future of many-core systems. While there is no theoretical limit to how many cores can be added into SoCs, there is very little progress in developing applications that can take advantage of all of those core... » read more

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