category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Wafer Cleaning Becomes Key Challenge In Manufacturing 3D Structures
By Adele Hars - 20 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

Wafer cleaning, once a rather mundane task as simple as dipping wafers in cleaning fluid, is emerging as one of the top major engineering challenges for manufacturing GAA FETs and 3D-ICs. With these new 3D structures — some on the horizon but some already in high-volume manufacturing — semiconductor wafer equipment and materials suppliers in the wet cleaning business are at the epicenter... » read more

What’s Different About Next-Gen Transistors
By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

After nearly a decade and five major nodes, along with a slew of half-nodes, the semiconductor manufacturing industry will begin transitioning from finFETs to gate-all-around stacked nanosheet transistor architectures at the 3nm technology node. Relative to finFETs, nanosheet transistors deliver more drive current by increasing channel widths in the same circuit footprint. The gate-all-aroun... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Rattles Chip Design Ecosystem
By Ann Mutschler - 19 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

Bespoke silicon developers are shaking up relationships, priorities, and methodologies across the semiconductor industry, creating demand for skills that cross traditional boundaries, and driving new business models that leverage these enormous investments. Bespoke silicon designers today are a rare breed, capable of understanding the unique requirements of a specific domain, as well as a gr... » 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

Beyond Autonomous Cars
By Marie C. Baca - 12 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

As the automotive industry takes a more measured approach to self-driving cars and long-haul trucks for safety and security reasons, there is a renewed focus on other types of vehicles utilizing autonomous technology. The list is long and growing. It now includes autonomous trains, helicopters, tractors, ships, submarines, drones, delivery robots, motorcycles, scooters, and bikes, all of whi... » read more

Why Silent Data Errors Are So Hard To Find
By Anne Meixner - 11 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 1

Cloud service providers have traced the source of silent data errors to defects in CPUs — as many as 1,000 parts per million — which produce faulty results only occasionally and under certain micro-architectural conditions. That makes them extremely hard to find. Silent data errors (SDEs) are random defects produced in manufacturing, not a design bug or software error. Those defects gene... » read more

Yield Is Top Issue For MicroLEDs
By Laura Peters - 11 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

MicroLED display makers are marching toward commercialization, with products such as Samsung’s The Wall TV and Apple’s smart watch expected to be in volume production next year or in 2024. These tiny illuminators are the hot new technology in the display world, enabling higher pixel density, better contrast, lower power consumption, and higher luminance in direct sunlight — while consu... » read more

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