The Shape Of Things To Come


By Ed Sperling The standard method of designing chips—by shrinking features and turning up the clock frequency—is running out of steam for many companies. It’s too difficult, too expensive, and without a commercially viable new lithography source it may become even more unrealistic for most applications. That certainly doesn’t mean Moore’s Law is ending, but it could become more o... » read more

Tech Talk: FinFETs, FD-SOI And The Future Of SoC Design


Mary Ann White, marketing manager for Synopsys' Galaxy Implementation Platform, talks with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering about new opportunities to reduce power and improve performance, and where the pain points will be. [youtube vid=kuJdcHIRxfU] » read more

Executive Briefing: Stacking The Odds


Open-Silicon CEO Naveed Sherwani talks with System-Level Design about progress on 2.5D and 3D stacked die, why this approach is inevitable, when it will begin and what markets will use it first. [youtube vid=mzwpgDKuIok] » read more

Executive Briefing: Andrew Yang


By Ed Sperling Andrew Yang, president of ANSYS subsidiary Apache Design, sat down with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering to talk about why power is becoming so important and where the future challenges lie. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: What’s the most important issue these days for chipmakers? Yang: According to the feedback we’ve gotten from our customer... » read more

The Evolving Interconnect


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Chip interconnect protocol requirements are evolving as designs move to 20nm and below process geometries, and not always in predictable ways. At least part of this is being driven by what an SoC is used for. The continued push to shrink features opens up real estate at each new process node. For the past decade, that real estate has been used to add more featu... » read more

The New Platform-Based Design


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Driven by the continued explosion in design costs, the term ‘platform-based design’ is evolving. A platform used to be viewed as an actual chip with some configurability on it that a semiconductor company promoted. Their customers would buy that chip in volume, configure it to their requirements, and sell it inside their end devices. The definition has beco... » read more

Inside The Package


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss IC packaging trends with Rich Rice, senior vice president for North America at Taiwan’s Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), the world’s largest independent IC packaging and test house. SMD: Amazingly, there are still more than 100 vendors competing in the IC test and assembly business today. But for year... » read more

Stacked Die From A Networking Angle


By Mark LaPedus The first wave of 2.5D chips using silicon interposers are trickling out in the marketplace.FPGA vendor Xilinx was the first chipmaker to ship a 2.5D device, and Altera, Cisco, Huawei and IBM recently have talked about their respective 2.5D chip developments. Generally, Altera and Xilinx have taken a somewhat identical and straightforward approach. The two companies are sepa... » read more

What’s Before Stacked Die?


By Mark LaPedus Advanced 2.5D/3D chip stacking has a number of challenges and is still a few years away from mass production. In fact, mass production may not occur until 2015 or 2016. But OEMs can ill afford to sit still and wait for 2.5D/3D technology to mature. So, until 2.5D/3D is ready for prime time, chipmakers and IC-packaging houses are under pressure to innovate and extend current ... » read more

Foundry Landscape Changes In 3D


By Mark LaPedus Over the last year, leading-edge silicon foundries announced their new and respective strategies in the emerging 2.5D/3D chip arena. The ink is barely dry and now the foundry landscape is changing. One new vendor, Tezzaron Semiconductor, is entering the market. The 3D DRAM supplier plans to provide select 2.5D/3D foundry services within its recently acquired fab in Austin, T... » read more

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