Experts At The Table: Issues In Metrology And Inspection


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future metrology and inspection challenges with John Allgair, senior member of the technical staff at GlobalFoundries; Kevin Heidrich, vice president of marketing and business development at Nanometrics; Robert Newcomb, executive vice president at Qcept Technologies; and Shrinivas Shetty, vice president of marketing f... » read more

Experts At The Table: Issues In Metrology And Inspection


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future metrology and inspection challenges with John Allgair, senior member of the technical staff at GlobalFoundries; Kevin Heidrich, vice president of marketing and business development at Nanometrics; Robert Newcomb, executive vice president at Qcept Technologies; and Shrinivas Shetty, vice president of marketing f... » read more

Throw In The Kitchen Sink


By Ed Sperling The number of options available for reducing power and improving performance are increasing for the first time in a decade. This is good news for chipmakers. It’s far less clear who stands to benefit on the tools, IP, capital equipment and manufacturing side. Choice is always a good thing in design. It allows teams to trade off one IP block for another, based upon the needs... » read more

Hot Stuff


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to thermal modeling, which has been practiced for many years, the challenges are daunting. The good news is that approaches are emerging as challenges increased with smaller process nodes and design complexity. Viewed from a number of viewpoints—transistor, chip, package, board and system—thermal models traditionally have been created from m... » read more

Ready For 3D-IC


This technical presentation describes the challenges and Mentor's solutions for verifying and testing IC designs targeted for 3D packages, such as stacked die using TSVs or multi-die packages using silicon interposers. To download this white paper, click here. » read more

Sprint To The Finish Line


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss future challenges, pain points, and how the supply chain is being reconfigured with Chi-Ping Hsu, senior vice president for R&D in the Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: Has the move to 20nm processes with 14nm finFETs progressed as smoothly as everyone hop... » 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

Fixing The Supply Chain


For all the promise and subsequent anxiety about moving to the next process node or stacking die, the real problem isn’t technology. It isn’t even cost per transistor. It’s who will take responsibility when something goes wrong. Notice the word “when” rather than “if.” Rising complexity means that chips no longer can be fully verified, so errors are a given. Some errors are wor... » read more

3 Ways To Differentiate


Time-to-market pressures and complexity have put the squeeze on design teams. They have to bring incredibly complex SoCs to market on time, make sure they’re functionally correct and work within a tight power budget, and they have to come in on or under budget. Amazingly, they’re still able to accomplish this, thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of engineers and some incredible adv... » read more

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