Power Shift


By Ed Sperling For the past decade, most of the real gains in energy efficiency were developed for chips inside mobile electronics because of the demand for longer battery life. Dark silicon now represents the majority of mobile devices, multiple power islands are commonplace to push many functions into deep sleep, and performance is usually the secondary concern for most applications. Whil... » read more

Getting Formal With Power


By Ed Sperling Formal methodologies have always been an important tool in the verification engineer’s toolbox because they often can pinpoint bugs faster and with more accuracy than other verification approaches. The problem is that most engineers don’t know how to use them, and understanding this technology to a proficiency level requires a learning curve that most engineers consider pain... » read more

Power Modeling: Use Cases Need to be Clearly Defined


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power modeling during the Design Automation Conference with Vic Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager at Apache Design; Paul Martin, design enablement and alliances manager at ARM; Sylvan Kaiser, CTO at Docea Power; and Frank Schirrmeister, group director, product marketing for system deve... » read more

Getting Ready For 20nm


By Ed Sperling and Mark Lapedus Despite hurdles in getting 28nm rolling and predictions that process technology will stick around for years to come, there appears to be rapidly growing interest in 20nm—at least from the design side. This is significant for a couple reasons. First, for most companies 20nm will be the first encounter with double patterning because EUV still is not viable—... » read more

Options And Hurdles Come Into Focus For 3D Stacking


By Mark LaPedus The initial round of stacked 2.5D and 3D chips based on through-silicon vias (TSVs) has emerged in the market. There are other 2.5D/3D chips in the pipeline, but it’s taking longer than expected to bring these devices into production. There are a range of design, manufacturing, supply chain and cost challenges associated with 2.5D/3D designs. The enormous risk to bring ... » read more

The Hidden Costs Of Directed Self-Assembly


By Mark LaPedus Directed self-assembly (DSA) has been billed by some as a potential paradigm shift in semiconductor manufacturing, but it may not turn out to be quite the panacea its proponents suggest—or at least not yet. There are many questions surrounding DSA, an alternative lithography technology that makes use of block copolymers to enable fine pitches. Key among those questions ar... » read more

ASMC: TSVs Needed as Scaling Challenges Mount


By David Lammers With the industry facing challenges in the introduction of EUV lithography and high costs for double patterning, TSV introductions have taken on heightened importance, participants said at the SEMI Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC), held in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in mid-May. Risto Puhakka, president of market research firm VLSI Research Inc., said the g... » read more

The 28nm Foundry Crunch


By Mark LaPedus Faced with huge and unforeseen demand at the 28nm node, leading-edge foundries are scrambling to play catch-up and are boosting their fab capacities at a staggering pace. But analysts warn that 28nm foundry capacity will be tight throughout 2012, and perhaps into 2013, putting some chipmakers in a pinch. Many blame the 28nm foundry capacity shortfall on a combination of t... » read more

The Brave New World Of Modeling TSVs


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With 2D ICs the prevailing notion has been that wire parasitics are relatively self-contained with the exception of very advanced designs running at hundreds of gigahertz. For the most part, the package designer and IC designer lived in their own separate worlds. With the advent of chip stacking using through silicon vias (TSVs), those worlds are being thrust together... » read more

Packaging Tradeoffs More Complex Than Ever


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Driven by high-speed interfaces, the demand for TSVs and the complexities that new process nodes bring, older packaging technologies like wirebonding can’t keep up. The latest and greatest flip chip technologies offer much more flexibility, but at a cost. As such, the package plays a larger role than ever in determining system specifications because, depending o... » read more

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