3D-IC For The Masses


The concepts of 3D-IC and chiplets have the whole industry excited. It potentially marks the next stage in the evolution of the IP industry, but so far, technical difficulties and cost have curtailed its usage to just a handful of companies. Even within those, they do not appear to be seeing benefits from heterogeneous integration or reuse. Attempts to make this happen are not new. "A decade... » read more

Multi-Party Computation for Securing Chiplets


A new technical paper titled "Garblet: Multi-party Computation for Protecting Chiplet-based Systems" was published by Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Abstract "The introduction of shared computation architectures assembled from heterogeneous chiplets introduces new security threats. Due to the shared logical and physical resources, an untrusted chiplet can act maliciously to surreptitiousl... » read more

Thermally Aware Chiplet Placement Algorithm Based on Automatic Differentiation (MIT, IBM)


A new technical paper titled "DiffChip: Thermally Aware Chip Placement with Automatic Differentiation" was published by researchers at MIT and IBM. Abstract "Chiplets are modular integrated circuits that can be combined to form a larger system, offering flexibility and performance enhancements. However, their dense packing often leads to significant thermal management challenges, requiring ... » read more

Chiplets: A Technology, Not A Market


Chiplets are big business, and that business is growing. The total chiplet market today is roughly $40 billion annually. Chiplets account for roughly 15% of TSMC's revenues, and they account for about 25% of all DRAMs. All of the major AI/HPC semiconductor companies (NVIDIA, AMD, Marvell, Broadcom) and the major hyper scalers (Amazon, Google, etc) are looking to chiplets to build superior... » read more

Lines Blurring Between Supercomputing And HPC


Supercomputers and high-performance computers are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate due to the proliferation of AI, which is driving huge performance increases in commercial and scientific applications and raising similar challenges for both. While the goals of supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) have always been similar — blazing fast processing — the mark... » read more

Multi-Die Design Complicates Data Management


The continued unbundling of SoCs into multi-die packages is increasing the complexity of those designs and the amount of design data that needs to be managed, stored, sorted, and analyzed. Simulations and test runs are generating increasing amounts of information. That raises questions about which data needs to be saved and for how long. During the design process, engineers now must wrestle ... » read more

Cracking The Memory Wall


Processor performance continues to improve exponentially, with more processor cores, parallel instructions, and specialized processing elements, but it is far outpacing improvements in bandwidth and memory. That gap, the so-called memory wall, has persisted throughout most of this century, but now it is becoming more pronounced. SRAM scaling is slowing at advanced nodes, which means SRAM takes ... » read more

Advanced Packaging Evolution: Chiplet And Silicon Photonics-CPO


As we enter the AI era, the demand for enhanced connectivity in cloud services and AI computing continues to surge. With Moore’s Law slowing down, the increasing data rate requirements are surpassing the advancements of any single semiconductor technology. This shift underscores the importance of heterogeneous integration (HI) as a crucial solution for alleviating bandwidth bottlenecks. Tod... » read more

Signal Integrity Plays Increasingly Critical Role In Chiplet Design


Maintaining the quality and reliability of electrical signals as they travel through interconnects is proving to be much more challenging with chiplets and advanced packaging than in monolithic SoCs and PCBs. Signal integrity is a fundamental requirement for all chips and systems, but it becomes more difficult with chiplets due to reflections, loss, crosstalk, process variation, and various ... » read more

Transformational Opportunities Coming To Semiconductor Manufacturing


During the GSA US Executive Forum in September 2024, a panel discussion brought together Marco Chisari, EVP from Samsung Semiconductor, Jeff Howell, Global VP for High Tech at SAP, and John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions. The purpose of the discussion was to compare and contrast the perspectives from one of the largest global semiconductor companies with that of the most widely used enterpri... » read more

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