What’s Next For Emulation


Emulation is now the cornerstone of verification for advanced chip designs, but how emulation will evolve to meet future demands involving increasingly dense, complex, and heterogeneous architectures isn't entirely clear. EDA companies have been investing heavily in emulation, increasing capacity, boosting performance, and adding new capabilities. Now the big question is how else they can le... » read more

Partitioning For Better Performance And Power


Partitioning is becoming more critical and much more complex as design teams balance different ways to optimize performance and power, shifting their focus from a single chip to a package or system involving multiple chips with very specific tasks. Approaches to design partitioning have changed over the years, most recently because processor clock speeds have hit a wall while the amount of d... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

3D Printing For More Circuits


After several years of experimentation, and growing success in volume manufacturing for some use cases, technologies for 3D printing of electronic circuits are becoming more common. Some innovations in processes and materials are moving these technologies closer to mainstream electronics manufacturing. Christopher Tuck, professor of material science at the University of Nottingham, observed ... » read more

Scaling Bump Pitches In Advanced Packaging


Interconnects for advanced packaging are at a crossroads as an assortment of new package types are pushing further into the mainstream, with some vendors opting to extend the traditional bump approaches while others roll out new ones to replace them. The goal in all cases is to ensure signal integrity between components in IC packages as the volume of data being processed increases. But as d... » read more

Gearing Up For High-NA EUV


The semiconductor industry is moving full speed ahead to develop high-NA EUV, but bringing up this next generation lithography system and the associated infrastructure remains a monumental and expensive task. ASML has been developing its high-numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography line for some time. Basically, high-NA EUV scanners are the follow-on to today’s EUV lithography systems... » read more

Progress On General-Purpose Quantum Computers


The race is on to scale up quantum computing, transforming it from an esoteric research tool into a commercially viable, general-purpose machine. Special-purpose quantum computers have been available for several years now. Systems like D-Wave’s Advantage focus on specific classes of problems that are amenable to modeling as quantum systems. Still, the ultimate goal of having a general purp... » read more

What’s Next For Transistors And Chiplets


Sri Samavedam, senior vice president of CMOS Technologies at Imec, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about finFET scaling, gate-all-around transistors, interconnects, packaging, chiplets and 3D SoCs. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: The semiconductor technology roadmap is moving in several different directions. We have traditional logic scaling, but packaging i... » read more

Improving Accuracy In Satellite Navigation Systems


Increasing dependency on the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) constellations is raising concerns about what happens when signals are unavailable, even for short periods of time. GNSS systems affect our daily lives in ways we often don’t see, from location services to cell phone timing. In fact, these satellites have become a necessary part of critical infrastructure, and higher ac... » read more

Get Ready For The Next Generation Of Wearable Tech


Wearables have attracted a lot of attention recently, due to both their successes as well as failures. They bring together requirements for packaging, new substrates, power scavenging, low-power, novel connectivity, flexibility, durability, as well as fashion. While some of the challenges remain formidable, the long-term potential is driving the industry to look at what is possible. They are... » read more

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