The Next Steps


By Aveek Sarkar Remaining competitive in today’s semiconductor market means IC designers must meet performance, power and price targets for their design, regardless of the end application. Meeting these mutually conflicting goals requires enlisting the use of several architectural and design techniques, including three-dimensional (3D) or stacked-die architectures that can help meet perfo... » read more

Managing Complexity With Advanced Packaging


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineering teams across the globe continue to pound the process geometry treadmill to stay on the curve of Dr. Moore to achieve better speed or lower power or smaller die—and it all adds up to increased complexity in the design and packaging. However, with advanced forms of die stacking such as package-on-package, silicon-in-package, 2.5D silicon interposer techno... » read more

Off The Planar


By Pallab Chatterjee 3D devices, FinFETs and new memory technologies are not just a future direction anymore. They’re real. That became evident at this year’s IEDM conference, where the focus of a number of sessions was on modeling, failure and reliability models, as well as lower power supply operations for these devices. Because FinFETs are not standard 2D MOS devices, their use i... » read more

Something Old, Something Borrowed


The basic rule of SoC design is that it needs to be created relatively quickly, work as planned, and that it can be manufactured at a reasonable cost and with good yield ramp. That eliminates revolutionary changes on the technology side, limits the number of new materials, and relegates the most dramatic shifts to the business. That’s why most of the most far-reaching technology research i... » read more

Betting On Glass TSVs


By Ed Sperling There are two big issues when it comes to through-silicon vias. One involves cost. The second involves heat—in particular, how to get heat out of a stacked die and what the thermal coefficient of the TSV will be to make sure it expands at a rate consistent with the SoCs in a package. To address these issues, System-Level Design caught up with Rao Tummala, professor of elect... » read more

RF, MEMS, Photonics Driving 3D Stacking


By Pallab Chatterjee At Semicon West, a number of the key speakers and TechXPOTs were talking about current products being assembled and shipped with 3D technology. 3D die stacking is no longer a technology of the future. In fact it has been here for many years and has been used in millions, if not billions, of consumer, commercial and high-reliability designs. The two leading technologies ... » read more

3D Stacking: A Reality Check


By Ed Sperling The first 2.5D and 3D chips are expected to arrive next year, with the mainstream chip market expected to follow in 2013. While this trend already has seen its share of hype, stacked die—whether through a series of TSVs in true 3D or through an interposer layer in 2.5D—is as real as Moore’s Law. In fact, it’s a direct result of Moore’s Law. But unlike the progres... » read more

Solving Memory Subsystem Bottlenecks In 3D Stacks


In today’s do-or-die market environment, many SOC makers strive to differentiate their product based upon the rate at which it performs processing. Closely coupled are power concerns that have led to dominance of a multi-core approach, while economic considerations have resulted in the dominance of the Unified Memory Architecture, where all the processors share access to external DRAM. Stacki... » read more

The Challenge of 3D


Juan Rey, senior director of engineering for Mentor Graphics' Design To Silicon Division, talks about 3D stacking and 3D structures on chips. [youtube vid=YiH5IkxiEHU] » read more

‘What If’ In 3D


By Ed Sperling ‘What if’ questions have become standard across multiple pieces of the design chain for any SoC, but the number is multiplying at each new process node. When the industry begins moving to 2.5D and 3D over the next couple years, the number of tradeoffs will likely move from overwhelming to unmanageable. That will set in motion a number of efforts in semiconductor design. ... » read more

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