More Options, Less Dark Silicon


Chipmakers are beginning to re-examine how much dark silicon should be used in a heterogenous system, where it works best, and what alternatives are available — a direct result of a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increasing disaggregation of SoCs. The concept of dark silicon has been around for a couple decades, but it really began taking off with the introduction of the Internet ... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management’s Growing Impact On IC Reliability


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about silicon lifecycle management, how it's expanding and changing, and where the problems are, with Prashant Goteti, principal engineer at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; Zoe Conroy, principal hardware engineer at Cisco; Subhasish Mitra, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University; a... » read more

Clocks Getting Skewed Up


At a logical level, synchronous designs are very simple and the clock just happens. But the clocking network is possibly the most complex in a chip, and it's fraught with the most problems at the physical level. To some, the clock is the AC power supply of the chip. To others, it is an analog network almost beyond analysis. Ironically, there are no languages to describe clocking, few tools t... » read more

UCIe: Marketing Ruins It Again


You may have seen the press release and articles recently about a new standard called UCIe. It stands for Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express. The standard is a great idea and will certainly help the market for chiplet-based designs to advance. But the name — Argggh. More on that later. First, let's talk about what it is. You may notice the name looks similar to PCIe (Peripheral Compone... » read more

Incremental Design Breakdown


For the past two decades, most designs have been incremental in nature. They heavily leveraged IP used in previous designs, and that IP often was developed by third parties. But there are growing problems with that methodology, especially at advanced nodes where back-end issues and the impact of 'shift left' are reducing the savings from reuse. The value of IP reuse has been well established... » read more

Planning EDA’s Next Steps


Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's new CEO, and the recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award in December, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's next in EDA, the underlying technology and business challenges and changes, and new markets that are unfolding for floor-planning, verification, CFD, and advanced packaging. SE: Where does EDA need to improve? Devgan: We have made it much... » read more

Chiplets Enter The Supercomputer Race


Several entities from various nations are racing each other to deliver and deploy chiplet-based exascale supercomputers, a new class of systems that are 1,000x faster than today’s supercomputers. The latest exascale supercomputer CPU and GPU designs mix and match complex dies in advanced packages, adding a new level of flexibility and customization for supercomputers. For years, various na... » read more

Designing a 2048-Chiplet, 14336-Core Waferscale Processor


Abstract "Waferscale processor systems can provide the large number of cores, and memory bandwidth required by today’s highly parallel workloads. One approach to building waferscale systems is to use a chiplet-based architecture where pre-tested chiplets are integrated on a passive silicon-interconnect wafer. This technology allows heterogeneous integration and can provide significant perfor... » read more

A Practical Approach To DFT For Large SoCs And AI Architectures, Part II


By Rahul Singhal and Giri Podichetty Part I of this article discusses the design-for-test (DFT) challenges of AI designs and strategies to address them at the die level. This part focuses on the test requirements of AI chips that integrate multiple dies and memories on the same package. Why 2.5D/3D chiplet-based designs for AI SoCs? Many semiconductor companies are adopting chiplet-based d... » read more

Which Processor Is Best?


Intel's embrace of RISC-V represents a landmark shift in the processor world. It's a recognition that no single company can own the data center anymore, upending a revenue model that has persisted since the earliest days of computing. Intel gained traction in that market in the early 1990s with the explosion of commodity servers, but its role is changing as processors become more customized and... » read more

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