Moore’s Law Now Requires Advanced Packaging

By Ed Sperling - 18 Apr, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsung. W... » read more

More Memory And Processor Tradeoffs

By Ed Sperling - 11 Apr, 2019 - Comments: 0

Creating a new chip architecture is becoming an increasingly complex series of tradeoffs about memories and processing elements, but the benefits are not always obvious when those tradeoffs are being made. This used to be a fairly straightforward exercise when there was one processor, on-chip SRAM and off-chip DRAM. Fast forward to 7/5nm, where chips are being developed for AI, mobile ph... » read more

GDDR6 – HBM2 Tradeoffs

By Ed Sperling - 10 Apr, 2019 - Comments: 0

Steven Woo, Rambus fellow and distinguished inventor, talks about why designers choose one memory type over another. Applications for each were clearly delineated in the past, but the lines are starting to blur. Nevertheless, tradeoffs remain around complexity, cost, performance, and power efficiency. Related Video Latency Under Load: HBM2 vs. GDDR6 Why data traffic and bandw... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power

By Jesse Allen - 22 Mar, 2019 - Comments: 0

Synopsys announced several new products: a new test family, a physical verification solution, and a software library for neural net SoCs. TestMAX, the new family of test products, includes soft error analysis and X-tolerant logic BIST for automotive test and functional safety requirements. TestMAX enables test through functional high-speed interfaces and supports early validation of DFT logi... » read more

The Importance Of Using The Right DDR SDRAM Memory

By Vadhiraj Sankaranarayanan - 14 Mar, 2019 - Comments: 0

Selecting the right memory technology is often the most critical decision for achieving the optimal system performance. Designers continue to add more cores and functionality to their SoCs; however, increasing performance while keeping power consumption low and silicon footprint small remains a vital goal. DDR SDRAMs, DRAMs in short, meet these memory requirements by offering a dense, high-perf... » read more

In-Memory Vs. Near-Memory Computing

By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2019 - Comments: 1

New memory-centric chip technologies are emerging that promise to solve the bandwidth bottleneck issues in today’s systems. The idea behind these technologies is to bring the memory closer to the processing tasks to speed up the system. This concept isn’t new and the previous versions of the technology fell short. Moreover, it’s unclear if the new approaches will live up to their billi... » read more

The Promise Of GDDR6 And 7nm

By Frank Ferro - 14 Feb, 2019 - Comments: 1

Research Nester, a market research and consulting firm, estimates that the “global market of computer graphics may witness a remarkable growth and reach at the valuation of $215.5 billion by the end of year 2024.” Plus, it says this market is expected to grow at a significant compound annual growth rate or CAGR of 6.1% over the forecast period 2017 to 2024. Computer graphics is just the ... » read more

China’s Foundry Biz Takes Big Leap Forward

By Mark LaPedus - 28 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 1

China continues to advance its foundry industry with huge investments in new fabs and technology, despite trade tensions and a slowdown in the IC market. China has the most fab projects in the world, with 30 new facilities or lines in construction or on the drawing board, according to data from SEMI’s World Fab Forecast Report. Of those, 13 fabs are targeted for the foundry market, accordi... » read more

Embedded Phase-Change Memory Emerges

By Mark LaPedus - 24 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 3

The next-generation memory market for embedded applications is becoming more crowded as another technology emerges in the arena—embedded phase-change memory. Phase-change memory is not new and has been in the works for decades. But the technology has taken longer to commercialize amid a number of technical and cost challenges. Phase-change memory, a nonvolatile memory type that stores data... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto

By Jeff Dorsch - 18 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 0

Internet of Things A dairy barn without any people working in it. An automated greenhouse for produce. Coming soon, little robots that will weed crop fields and look for diseased plants. This is Rivendale Farms, in the countryside west of Pittsburgh, which is 175 acres serving as a beta site for agricultural Internet of Things technology. The small farm has about 150 Jersey cows, each of which... » 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.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

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

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

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?

by Brian Bailey

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

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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