Fundamental Changes In Economics Of Chip Security


Protecting chips from cyberattacks is becoming more difficult, more expensive and much more resource-intensive, but it also is becoming increasingly necessary as some of those chips end up in mission-critical servers and in safety-critical applications such as automotive. Security has been on the semiconductor industry's radar for at least the past several years, despite spotty progress and ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Edge, cloud, data center Synopsys launched its USB4 IP and tools, already with a successful tapeout of a USB4 PHY test chip on 5nm advanced FinFET process. The Designware USB4 IP’s throughput is up to 20 or 40 Gbps, which Synopsys says is the bandwidth needed for high-performance edge AI, storage, PC, and tablet SoC designs. Also, Samsung Foundry certified Synopsys’ Design Compiler NXT for ... » read more

Designing The Next Big Things


The edge is a humongous opportunity for the semiconductor industry. The problem, despite its name, is that it's not a single thing. It will be comprised of thousands of different chips and systems, and very few will be sold in large volumes. The edge is the culmination of decades of improvement in power and performance, coupled with the architectural creativity that has exploded since the bene... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Chiplets


The chiplet model continues to gain traction in the market, but there are still some challenges to enable broader support for the technology. AMD, Intel, TSMC, Marvell and a few others have developed or demonstrated devices using chiplets, which is an alternative way to develop an advanced design. Beyond that, however, the adoption of chiplets is limited in the industry due to ecosystem issu... » read more

‘More Than Moore’ Reality Check


The semiconductor industry is embracing multi-die packages as feature scaling hits the limits of physics, but how to get there with the least amount of pain and at the lowest cost is a work in progress. Gaps remain in tooling and methodologies, interconnect standards are still being developed, and there are so many implementations of packaging that the number of choices is often overwhelming. ... » read more

Inevitable Bugs


Are bug escapes inevitable? That was the fundamental question that Oski Technology recently put to a group of industry experts. The participants are primarily simulation experts who, in many cases, help direct the verification directions for some of the largest systems companies. In order to promote free discussion, all comments have been anonymized, distilling the primary thoughts of the parti... » read more

The Story Behind Advanced Packaging, Heterogeneous Integration and Test


The introduction of AMD’S FIJI chip a few years ago marked an important technology turning point for the semiconductor industry. This revolutionary graphics product delivered capability and innovation by relying on the first commercial example of 2.5D heterogenous integration, featuring a GPU assembled with High-Bandwidth-Memory (HBM) using Through-Silicon-Via (TSV) interconnect and interpose... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


The coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to have an impact on most, if not all, industries. This includes the electronics, semiconductor and related segments. International Data Corp. (IDC) has released a report on the company’s view on the impact the COVID-19 virus will have on the semiconductor market. The report provides a framework to evaluate the market impact through four scenarios. "... » read more

HBM Issues In AI Systems


All systems face limitations, and as one limitation is removed, another is revealed that had remained hidden. It is highly likely that this game of Whac-A-Mole will play out in AI systems that employ high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Most systems are limited by memory bandwidth. Compute systems in general have maintained an increase in memory interface performance that barely matches the gains in... » read more

Power Management Becomes Top Issue Everywhere


Power management is becoming a bigger challenge across a wide variety of applications, from consumer products such as televisions and set-top-boxes to large data centers, where the cost of cooling server racks to offset the impact of thermal dissipation can be enormous. Several years ago, low-power design was largely relegated to mobile devices that were dependent on a battery. Since then, i... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →