New Architectures, Much Faster Chips

By Ed Sperling and Ann Mutschler - 31 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

The chip industry is making progress in multiple physical dimensions and with multiple architectural approaches, setting the stage for huge performance increases based on more modular and heterogeneous designs, new advanced packaging options, and continued scaling of digital logic for at least a couple more process nodes. A number of these changes have been discussed in recent conferences. I... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

By Susan Rambo - 28 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

Pervasive computing — data center, edge, IoT Marvell is working on silicon for the data infrastructure market using TSMC’s 5nm process node. Marvell says it has multiple designs already under contract for its 5nm portfolio across the carrier, enterprise, automotive, and data center markets. The first products are sampling by the end of next year. Ansys’ multiphysics signoff tools, R... » read more

Finding Defects With E-Beam Inspection

By Mark LaPedus - 20 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

Several companies are developing or shipping next-generation e-beam inspection systems in an effort to reduce defects in advanced logic and memory chips. Vendors are taking two approaches with these new e-beam inspection systems. One is a more traditional approach, which uses a single-beam e-beam system. Others, meanwhile, are developing newer multi-beam technology. Both approaches have thei... » read more

Power And Performance Optimization At 7/5/3nm

By Ed Sperling - 13 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power optimization with Oliver King, CTO at Moortec; João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys; Dino Toffolon, senior vice president of engineering at Synopsys; Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Kiran Burli, senior director of marketing for Arm's Physical Design Group; Kam Kittrell, senior product management group d... » read more

Speeding Up The R&D Metrology Process

By Mark LaPedus - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Several chipmakers are making some major changes in the characterization/metrology lab, adding more fab-like processes in this group to help speed up chip development times. The characterization/metrology lab, which is generally under the radar, is a group that works with the R&D organization and the fab. The characterization lab is involved in the early analytical work for next-generati... » read more

Atomic Layer Etch Expands To New Markets

By Mark LaPedus - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry is developing the next wave of applications for atomic layer etch (ALE), hoping to get a foothold in some new and emerging markets. ALE, a next-generation etch technology that removes materials at the atomic scale, is one of several tools used to process advanced devices in a fab. ALE moved into production for select applications around 2016, although the technolog... » read more

Smaller Nodes, Much Bigger Problems

By Ed Sperling - 15 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 3

João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about device scaling, advanced packaging, increasing complexity and the growing role of AI. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: We've been pushing along Moore's Law for roughly a half-century. What sorts of problems are you seeing now that you didn't see a couple nodes ago? Geada: The... » read more

Power Impact At The Physical Layer Causes Downstream Effects

By Ann Mutschler - 09 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Data movement is rapidly emerging as one of the top design challenges, and it is being complicated by new chip architectures and physical effects caused by increasing density at advanced nodes and in multi-chip systems. Until the introduction of the latest revs of high-bandwidth memory, as well as GDDR6, memory was considered the next big bottleneck. But other compute bottlenecks have been e... » read more

Simplifying And Speeding Up Verification

By Ed Sperling - 16 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 1

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's ahead for verification with Daniel Schostak, Arm fellow and verification architect; Ty Garibay, vice president of hardware engineering at Mythic; Balachandran Rajendran, CTO at Dell EMC; Saad Godil, director of applied deep learning research at Nvidia; Nasr Ullah, senior director of performance architecture at SiFive. What follows are excerpt... » read more

How To Improve DPPM By 10X Without Affecting Yield

By Shai Eisen - 15 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chips today are under immense pressure. With wider process variation manifested at wafer and die levels in single-digit nodes, highly complex designs, and effects of application and system integration, it’s no wonder the electronics value chain is becoming ever more reliant on expensive guard-bands. The ecosystem is not yet equipped to find all existing defects during test. So while quality e... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

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Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

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NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

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Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

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